EDIT: THIS DID NOT WORK FOR ME!

I thought that it worked at first, I did several tests, downloading in 100 mbit from the internet using 10 different connections and transfering files from my server in 275 mbit. But today the network connection has dropped twice for me. If this works for you, then I’m happy for you. If you have another solution, please leave a comment. Thank you.

I have an on-board Marvell Yukon 88E8053 PCI-E gigabit ethernet controller (rev 15), which kept dropping the network connection during heavy load using the sky2 driver. I tried to compile the sk98lin driver instead, but I couldn’t get it to compile successfully on my system. That’s when I found out that MSI might not be correctly implemented, fortunately the MSI feature can be easily turned off in the latest sky2 driver using the disable_msi option.

Permanently disable MSI

1. Open the /etc/modules file for editing:

sudo gedit /etc/modules

2. Add the following new line:

sky2 disable_msi=1

3. Restart your computer. And viola, hopefully your NIC will now have stopped dropping your connection all the time.

Temporarily disable MSI

If you would like to test if the diable_msi option works for you before disabling it “permanently”, or to avoid a restart. Then you can unload the sky2 driver manually and load it with the disable_msi=1 option.

sudo rmmod sky2
sudo modprobe sky2 disable_msi=1