I've tried in vain for some time now to get my old dual-proc SuperMac S900 to work properly with more than the OEM 10 Mb NIC installed. I've had relatively little difficulty with 'unstable' on this box. It successfully boots either 2.4 or 2.6 kernels. Networking fails in various ways when I install a second NIC. Usually, the installed devices can still be configured, but they just don't respond to any attempts to communicate over the network. For instance, attempting to request a DHCP lease fails as if there were no other hosts on the network.
I've tried two different NICs: a 100Mb LinkSys and a gigabit RealTek-based model. Both exhibitied similar behaviors. When booted from the 2.4.25-powerpc-smp-pmac kernel, I can get the gigabit card to be recognized, and can configure the device, but at the first sign of network activity (pings from another machine, in this case), the SuperMac essentially locks up, spewing "too much work at interrupt" down the monitor. When booted from the 2.6.8-powerpc-smp kernel, I don't even have to have a second NIC installed to cause problems. I can probe in the r8169 RealTek gigabit driver (which I don't think I *should* be able to do when the card isn't even installed), which immediately kills the OEM NIC -- it just won't configure any longer. Attempting to remove the r8169 module freezes up the machine. I couldn't find any mention of this sort of problem in the archives. Any ideas? I'd pull the OEM card, but it also happens to include the serial ports. Paul
