[3c509] 3c515 issue

[Donald Becker]

On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Kris Van Hees wrote:

> I realize that neither lists I post this to address the 3c515 directly, but
> since there is no 3c515 list, I hope that subscribers here may be able
> to help me out.

> The situation is that I have an old machine that is being used as a router.  It
> holds two ISA 3c509 (10) cards and a single ISA 3c515 (10/100) card.  The 3c515
> works although it reports at module load:
> 
> 3c515.c:v0.99t 17-Nov-2001 becker@scyld.com and others
> ISAPNP reports 3Com Fast EtherLink ISA at i/o 0x280, irq 10
> 3c515 Resource configuration register 0x008a, DCR 0483.
> eth2: 3Com 3c515 at 0x280, 00:60:08:04:87:dd, DMA 3, IRQ 10
>   64K word-wide RAM 1:1 Rx:Tx split, autoselect/10baseT interface.
> 1 3c515 cards found.
> 
> which seems to imply that the card is running in 10BaseT mode rather than the
> expected 100BaseTX (since it is connected to a 10/100 switch).

The key part of the message is "autoselect".

> On top of this, an ftp between the router and another host on the switch (known
> to be using 100BaseTX) runs at about 1262.3 kB/s whereas a transfer between
> two hosts on the switch that are known to be using 100BaseTX, the transfer rate
> is 10706.9 kB/s.

Uhmmm, this is a card on the ISA bus.  At best you will get 5.33MB/sec,
and that is with 100% of the CPU time waiting for the ISA bus and no
dropped packets.

> Finally, an ifconfig reports that basically every transmitted packet has a
> carrier error associated with it:

This is a bug in the driver -- the negotiated full duplex setting isn't
being correctly set in the NIC.  I would help, but that's a modified
driver.  You should ask the last person to modify it for support.

-- 
Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993