New Marvell GBit NIC Driver Causes Full System Freeze

Hi All,

I was wondering if anyone else can replicate this?

After ruling out my antivirus, sound card, and other drivers, I finally figured out that it was the new Marvell Yukon Gigabit Network Interface driver that was causing my system to freeze (hard freeze requiring the reset button to recover rather than just using Task Manager).

I'm using the Marvell Yukon and have the NVIDIA network adapter disabled because I've read that the NVIDIA is even more screwy.

Please see my signature for specs. The only other possible variables that I haven't ruled out is my network hardware (Linksys router, Linksys GB switch, Linksys Wireless Access Point).

Anyways, Marvell just released a new driver: v8.35.2.3 (7/20/2005)

Whenever I would stream Quicktime movies with this driver installed, about 80% of the time, the system would lock up hard. For those movies that wouldn't cause a system freeze on their own, they would almost always freeze it if I then went to another Firefox window and began downloading a large file from the web while the Quicktime movie continued to download/stream. First the window would freeze, then the mouse, then sometimes the internal speaker would begin to beep and then get stuck on a piercing eternal wail. . .

I moved my sound card around, I installed the AMD CPU drivers. I tried not using my sound card at all (yanked it out). I tried disabling antivirus. Finally, I tried rolling back the network driver, and this fixed it. Version 7.21.2.3 (8/19.2004) still allows me to play Quicktime movies without locking up the system.

Here are two movies that I could count on to lock up my system quickly and reliably if I was running the newer driver (8.35.2.3):

High Tension Trailer (choose the "medium" size option to fully replicate my choices).

Dark Water Trailer (again, choose the "medium" size option).
Edit: This trailer locks up even a healthy computer. The "medium" quicktime stream is flawed. I tried it on my laptop and it locks up too in both IE and Firefox.

Even with the new driver, I could watch some Quicktime movies. It seemed like the ones with the snazzy interface that hides the generic Quicktime interface would run more reliably than others. But, with that new network driver, there were some I just could not play. With the older driver, I can play them all. . . though "Dark Water" still sometimes crashes (softly, with a "Mozilla must close" error message) if I try to stream it while downloading a large file in another window. All others seem to work now just fine without a hitch.

Can anyone with a similar setup replicate this?

That new driver is trouble! And it's now being offered on WindowsUpdate!

Best Regards,

H

Hmmm, were you getting intermittant freezes just while sitting at the desktop? Marvell Gbit nic here with new driver and I have been noticing totally random freezes in 2d (and strange performance from the nic in general) ...I was thinking my O/C was doing something strange (even when its prime stable for 2-3 hours)....i'll give this a shot.

Well, I wasn't getting random crashes, but I guess I could say that the machine wasn't acting quite normal. But since I've only had this setup for a couple days now, I don't have much to compare it to. It seemed to randomly pause while working with normal 2D stuff. Not drastically. But it just didn't seem very fluid.

The Asus forum has another report of random freezes while downloading (anything, not just Quicktime) until he rolled back to the previous driver.

Let me know how your testing goes!

H

Took me about 2 weeks to figure it out after stress testing every other thing in the computer, but ends up I was having same problem with driver v8.35.2.3 causing my system to freeze up completely and seemingly randomly about 4-8 times a day. Found that it was freezing more frequently when I had a lot of connections open. Anyway long story short yeah v8.35.2.3 was causing my system to freeze to when I just cheeked back on Marvell’s site trying to figure out where I got the drivers and looks like they took it off most likely due to this problem. Thanks for the weeks of hardake and hair loss due to system freezing Marvell. Did not however relate a connection to playing QuickTime videos and system freezing just seemed so random. Anyway rolled back to vv8.32.2.3 and been running for 23 hours 24 min no freeze 

dchl said:

I just cheeked back on Marvell’s site trying to figure out where I got the drivers and looks like they took it off most likely due to this problem.

Click to expand...

Actually, I just looked and the bad (newest) driver is still available for download. Which, of course, is a bad thing.

H

I was having this problem with a Gigabyte MB with Marvell NIC. The newest drivers, version 8.39, has fixed it for me. Version 8.35 had the bug.

http://www.marvell.com/products/pcconn/yukon/index.jsp
http://www.marvell.com/drivers/driverDisplay.do?dId=102&pId=2

Same problem, Asus A8N-SLI

rolled back to the cd drivers and everything has been fine since.

WHOA!!! For the past couple of days I've been experiencing random freezes when I reinstalled windows xp and installed the latest Marvell Gigabit LAN drivers from windows update (yea yea.. stupid move...never will I install anything from there except for critical updates).

My pc would occasionally freeze 10 minutes into load up, 1 hour, 5 hours..it was totally random and I couldn't figure out what happened.

I totally uninstalled the driver and just installed the old Marvell driver that came with my Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard. So far its been 6 hours and no freeze... so far so good!

What a headache it was too... I thought maybe my hard drive was about to bite the dust or something...

This thread should be a good warning for those with Marvell Gigabit LAN on their motherboards (and I suppose to LAN cards too).

Yeah me to i checked about every single other thing in my computer even psu to try and find the prob. took me about a week to figure it out.After i strted usning a pci nic myncomputers been working fine, Uptime: (1week 5days 18hours 42minuits 56seconds)

Thanks for this thread! I've been having random BSODs for a number of weeks and came close to replacing the Rev 1 A8V with some new gear and a reformat/reinstall. Saw this thread and went back to the older drivers and so far so good (knockin' on wood although an A8N/4800X2/7800GTX upgrade would be spiffy).

yep know issue had the same problem here. did a roll back and all is ok again. I think even MS had the "bad" driver on windows updates under hardware.