forcedeth driver on Asus A8N-E hangs

[Michael Monnerie <m.monnerie@zmi.at>]

Hello, I apologize I'm not a developer, but want to try helping in 
fixing a bug with the forcedeth driver. I use SUSE 10.0 with all 
updates and actual kernel 2.6.13-15.8 as provided from SUSE (just self 
compiled to optimize for Athlon64, SMP, and HZ=100), with an Asus A8N-E 
motherboard, and an Athlon64x2 CPU. The onboard network card is this:
00:0a.0 Class 0680: 10de:0057 (rev a3)

00:0a.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 Ethernet Controller (rev a3)
        Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. K8N4-E Mainboard
        Flags: 66MHz, fast devsel, IRQ 50
        Memory at 00000000d3000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        I/O ports at b000 [size=8]
        Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2

and the problem is that it hangs and stops working when there is a 
higher load. Even before that, there seems to be a disturbance, as I/O 
was quite slow: Linux server, Apple client: FTP/NFS, etc all slow.
I put a Realtek8169 into the system and now it works perfect, so its 
obviously a driver bug, as I have the same hardware in another place 
showing the same behaviour (works on very low load, stops when really 
used).

Is there a workaround?

Output from the kernel source script "sh scripts/ver_linux":

Linux baum 2.6.13-15.8-ZMI #1 SMP Tue Feb 28 16:07:49 CET 2006 x86_64 
x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Gnu C                  4.0.2
Gnu make               3.80
binutils               2.16.91.0.2
util-linux             2.12q
mount                  2.12q
module-init-tools      3.2-pre8
e2fsprogs              1.38
jfsutils               1.1.8
reiserfsprogs          3.6.18
reiser4progs           line
xfsprogs               2.6.36
Linux C Library        2.3.5
Dynamic linker (ldd)   2.3.5
Linux C++ Library      6.0.6
Procps                 3.2.5
Net-tools              1.60
Kbd                    1.12
Sh-utils               5.3.0
udev                   068
Modules Loaded         vmnet vmmon joydev af_packet iptable_filter 
ip_tables button battery ac ipv6 ide_cd cdrom sundance mii shpchp 
pci_hotplug generic ehci_hcd i2c_nforce2 ohci_hcd usbcore i2c_core 
dm_mod reiserfs raid1 fan thermal processor sg sata_nv libata amd74xx 
sd_mod scsi_mod ide_disk ide_core
-- 
// Michael Monnerie, Ing.BSc  ---   it-management Michael Monnerie
// http://zmi.at           Tel: 0660/4156531          Linux 2.6.11
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