eepro100 performance problems

[Peter Mardahl]

> 
> He's suggested it might be a defective board, saying:
>     >The reason I am
>     >saying this is because after setting the board to 100 FD, it was not abl
>e
>     >to autonegotiate with the switch, which was set to autonegotiate. After 
>I
>     >switched the switch to 100 FD, it was able to make a connection. Usually
>     >when autonegotiation fails, it doesn't fail completely, it just keeps
>     >trying, the result being about 3mbs thruput.ie toggling on and off to 10
>     >mbs.

Dear Andrew,

  I've never had any luck getting things to autonegotiate when one
of the parties is "forced".  In my case, the switch was "set" to
100MHz/FD, but my eepro100's all went to 100MHz/HD, which really
screws things up performance wise.

  I don't think autonegotiation works properly when one of the parties
has been "forced".

  Either set both to autonegotiate, or set both to 100MHz/FD:  the
latter is the most reliable method.

  The telltale for malfunction in our case was the contents of
/proc/net/dev
we had a lot of "carrier", which seemed to happen when the switch was 100MHz/FD
and the board was left to autonegotiate.

PeterM