[Avila] fatal ethernet error on gw2348-4

[David Acker]

devel wrote:
> ARGH!!! Its back again. I'm not seeing the fatal error message on the 
> console, but I still from time to time am not receiving on the eth0 port 
> for some computers. I may increase the buffer number from 64 to 
> something else, 128? I'm not sure what that could possibly do to the NPE 
> driver. Any thoughts?
> 
> Travis

When I mistakenly created a broadcast loop by having two routers 
connected by both ethernet and a wireless connection I found that 
eventually ethernet receive would fail again.  I need to research this 
more.  I believe the problem is related to having ethernet in 
promiscuous mode and lots of broadcast traffic.  Note this quote from 
the intel source about the IX_ETHACC_NE_FILTERMASK flag:
"Certain frames, which should normally be fully filtered by the NPE to 
due the destination MAC address being on the same segment as the Rx port 
are still forwarded to the XScale (although the payload is invalid) in 
order to learn the MAC address of the transmitting station, if this is 
unknown.  Normally EthAcc will filter and recycle these framess 
internally and no frames with the FILTER bit set will be received by the 
client."

I need to walk through this code more deeply.  The first time through I 
was just focused on getting rid of the error message.  Now it seems 
there is another problem.
-Ack