Hi Andrew,

it is waiting for the watchdog to trigger :-) TBH the 1s seems to be too
short to for the dma ring length to be flushed and i had to pick some
value and 5 is used most places.

it really depends on the amount of packets in the queue, their length
and the mac setting. the timeout needs to be large enough that it would
not trigger incorrectly even if the mac is on 10mbit half duplex and all
frames in the queue were maximum size.

So you are saying there is 5 seconds worth of traffic in the transmit ring.

As a general point, not specific to this driver, is that wise? Isn't
that really bad buffer bloat?

I just wondered what happened to cause it to have 5 seconds worth of
traffic in the transmit ring. Did downstream signal a pause?  But i
thought the byte queue limit was designed to prevent a big backlog in
the transmit queue? At 10/Half, is it not reacting fast enough?  Since
it is half duplex, do you have a lot of traffic coming the other way
and something is not being fair at distributing up and down traffic?

I'm just wondering if by increasing the watchdog to 5 seconds, you are
just hiding a problem.

    Andrew