On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, Greg Earle wrote:

> 
> While trying to FTP the source tarballs, I'm getting a serious rash of
> the following hme0 error:
> 
> 	hme0: invalid packet size 2048; dropping

I'm not sure that's error, if there are packets larger then expected
(mtu?) driver drops them. I'd check who sends them.

> 
> with other intermittent diagnostic messages interspursed like
> 
> 	hme0: status=30001<GOTFRAME,RXTOHOST,NORXD>
> 	hme0: status=20001<GOTFRAME,NORXD>
> 	hme0: status=30101<GOTFRAME,SENTFRAME,RXTOHOST,NORXD>

I saw this, primarily it means that driver doesn't have enough receive
buffers, i.e. input traffic is too big for driver/os. Could be caused
on busy network when card is in promisc. mode.
Is this thing happenning all the time or only during download?
Do you run tcpdump when this happens?

You can increase the number of buffers(descriptors), it is _HME_NDESC
in hme.c(line 186 for 1.19). It can be set to 32,64,128 or 256, nothing
else.

Another thing, I don't know if console output can slowdown the kernel,
if it does then it explains why driver can't keep up with traffic.

Andrey