Bug in kaweth USB nic driver - cant use 2.4.20, want gentoo!

[Valhalla1]

I love gentoo and want to install it on this ancient Packard Bell P133 I have, just for kicks because this thing has been collecting dust for years.


no nic or exapnsion slots, so I put a usb nic on it which works great on this machine in windows, and booted a gentoo 1.4r3 live cd

it doesnt find the 3com 3c19250 usb nic, so i google and find I need the 'kaweth' driver.

so I 'modprobe kaweth'

I get some "kfree_skb on hard irq" warning messages. but 'ifconfig' shows eth0 now, so I net-setup eth0 and give it an ip/gateway etc.

now, I can ping localhost, the gateway, and internet machines.. but when I ping anything other than localhost, for each ICMP reply, I get another warning :kfree_skb on hard irq

it is flooding my /var/logs.. also, I can not SSH into the machine after successfully starting ssh. after a few minutes, I try /etc/init.d/net.eth0 restart, and it fails with lots more error messages.


now.. I cant SSH into the machine from any host, the ssh client just sits there waiting.. for something.. meanwhile the packard bells logs are filling up with error messages

anyway.. groups.google.com seems a few people have the same problem with kaweth driver in 2.4.20, and suggest going to 2.4.19. I want gentoo on this computer! gentoo livecd has 2.4.20 kernel. how can i go about installing gentoo, with either a 2.5.x kernel (read some mentions of 'kaweth fix' for 2.5.x changelogs) or, 2.4.19 or less?

or maybe just go with debian and 2.2.X? (if I can even use kaweth in that..)

[livewire]

try the second kernel (2.4.21_pre7)

type "smp" at boot prompt

[Valhalla1]

is running an smp-(optomized?) kernel on a pentium classic 133 would be okay? (assuming this one works with my usb nic)

[Valhalla1]

bump