[eepro100] mii-diag strangeness

Joe Rouvier joe@netli.com
Wed May 8 23:06:01 2002


On Wed, 2002-05-08 at 19:50, Donald Becker wrote:
> On 8 May 2002, Joe Rouvier wrote:
> 
> > I'm having a strange problem with mii-diag on IBM Netfinity 4000R's.  It
> > seems that mii-diag works fine as a non-root user, but reads all nulls
> > when run as root, and fails to force an interface to a specific mode,
> > etc.  This problem is reproducable on different boxes.  Mii-diag
> > compiled with and without libmii.c return the same result.
> 
> Hmmm, this is curious.
> My drivers only check for 'root' with MII writes, not reads.
> What driver version are you using?

eepro100.c:v1.09j-t 9/29/99...
eepro100.c: $Revision: 1.36 $ 2000/11/17...
As distributed with linux kernel 2.4.9

and:

mii-diag.c:v2.03 11/5/2001
libmii.c:v2.04 5/16/2001
eepro100-diag.c:v2.07 12/28/2001
 
> > One item of note.  The Netfinity 4000R uses almost exactly the same
> > motherboard as the Network Engines WebEngine, but with a different
> > BIOS.  The problem does not happen on WebEngine boxes.
> 
> That's very strange!
> 
> > eepro-diag output:
> ...
> > Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100 EEPROM contents:
> >   Station address 00:06:29:DE:D4:79.
> >   Board assembly 001024-010, Physical connectors present: RJ45
> >   Primary interface chip i82555 PHY #1.
> >    Sleep mode is enabled.  This is not recommended.
> >    Under high load the card may not respond to
> >    PCI requests, and thus cause a master abort.
> >    To clear sleep mode use the '-G 0 -w -w -f' options.
> 
> You should pay attention to this.

Oops, yeah, I should. 

-- 
 Joe Rouvier
 Systems Administrator
 Netli.com
 (650)812-0565 x131