So, last night in another forum chopps reported seeing obviously
trashed packets coming in his fxp interface when he ran tcpdump.

I no longer have the log lying around, but the bogus packets had their
tail overwritten by a sequence of 0x55's, and were shorter than the
minimum legal ethernet frame size.  My guess is that these were broken
"runt" packets which had been stepped on by collisions..

Now, looking through the driver code, I note the following in fxp_init();

	cbp->save_bf =		prm;	/* save bad frames */
	cbp->disc_short_rx =	!prm;	/* discard short packets */

"prm" is 1 if the device is being put into promiscuous mode, 0
otherwise.  Is there any particularly good reason to do this sort of
thing by default? (i.e., does promiscuous mode lose valid frames on
the fxp unless you also tell the chip to receive broken frames and
runts?)  

					- Bill