Intel e1000 power save

From Paul M in a post to support@, in reference to “em0: Watchdog timeout – resetting” problem.

we had this, it was very odd, it only started happening when we upgraded the bios on a tyan motherboard to fix other problems, the firewalls had never shown the problem before.

in desperation we tried a fix which we’d only ever previously used for linux - there used to be a problem with the e1000 driver when power saving is enabled in the e1000’s eeprom. the fix worked, and I applied it by booting a linux rescue disk and ran the eeprom fix program that I got from the e1000 sourceforce website; their wiki seems to have disappeared so I can’t find the script, so I’ve placed a copy here: http://www.zaurus.org.uk/download/scripts/fixeep-82573-dspd.sh

if you have the problem on linux you get “detected tx unit hang” thus: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1463045&group_id=42302&atid=447449

Also mirrored here: http://files.pfsense.org/misc/fixeep-82573-dspd.sh.txt