Current info: Maximum NICs, eth, token ring, VMware

[Bob George]

Hi all,

Thanks to the input from many on this list, I've got VMware up and running
quite nicely on my Linux box. This is allowing me to set up a nice little
self-study networking lab. However, I'm running into some annoying problems.

I'm running RedHat 6.2 with kernel 2.2.14-5SMP. I've currently got:
1 Netgear FA-310TX [tulip] 10/100
3 RTL8139 generics
1 good old fashioned IBM Token Ring II adapter (ISA)
vmnet 1 & 3 (host-only VMware)

All come up and generally work, at least for a bit. I seem to start getting
various errors on the Token Ring card after it's been up for a while, and
tonight I noticed a lot of "kernel: eth3: Tx queue start entry 4  dirty
entry 0" messages in my syslog output.

I'm wondering if I've hit some limitation with Linux and networking. Is
there a limit of concurrent NICs in 2.2?

Also I noticed problems using Zebra with multicast and MTU sizes over the
token ring. Anyone a Token Ring/Linux wiz?

I think I'm OK for interrupts:

/proc/interrupts:
           CPU0       CPU1
  0:     404095     402615    IO-APIC-edge  timer
  1:       3410       3513    IO-APIC-edge  keyboard
  2:          0          0          XT-PIC  cascade
  3:         38         56    IO-APIC-edge  serial
  4:          4          0    IO-APIC-edge  serial
  6:         13         15    IO-APIC-edge  floppy
  7:        794        739    IO-APIC-edge  ibmtr
  8:      12512      10465    IO-APIC-edge  rtc
  9:       7920      10743    IO-APIC-edge  soundblaster
 11:      20551      20471   IO-APIC-level  eth0, eth1, eth2
 12:      42018      43259    IO-APIC-edge  PS/2 Mouse
 13:          1          0          XT-PIC  fpu
 14:     432521     435114    IO-APIC-edge  ide0
 15:       8257       7742    IO-APIC-edge  ide1
NMI:          0
ERR:          0

It's truly amazing stuff, but these "once in a while" problems are driving
me nuts!

Any tips/info appreciated.

Thanks,

- Bob