Problems with DEUNA (de0: buffer unavailable)

[Thomas Narten]

We have several DEUNA boards on VAXen running 4.2BSD. Every once in a
while, the message "de0: buffer unavailable" appears. It is usually not
a serious problem (i.e. the message appears only once in a long while),
but sometimes the message appears hundreds of times during several
minutes bringing the machine to its knees.

I remember this problem being  described several months ago as possibly
being a hardware problem, namely the board gets stuck thinking that it
is transmitting something when it isn't. The suggested fix was to add a
timer process to the driver that reset the board when it locked up in
tis fasshion. The problem appeared on the DEQNA board as well.

Can anyone confirm that this is the problem, and has someone already
written a fix?

Thanks,
Thomas Narten
narten at purdue.EDU
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