LinkSys EtherFast 10/100 LAN Card

[Peter Monta]

> I bought this card today, mainly because the box proudly claimed that
> the card was supported by Linux.  Any manufacturer that devotes ink to
> reporting Linux connectivity should be rewarded, in my opinion.

I agree, but it would be nice if these cards then proceeded to
actually work under some version of the existing Linux drivers.
It's not that hard for them to check, is it?

> EEPROM contents:
>   0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
>   0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000

I'm not certain whether you're using a CardBus PCMCIA card or
a regular PCI card.  I purchased the CardBus variety recently,
and after some very helpful mails from Donald Becker, it developed
that the card has a larger EEPROM than usual, needing a different
read-strategy.  It was the same symptom, a blank-looking EEPROM
(but mine was all 'ff's).

The v0.90 driver has a request not to distribute near the top,
so since I'm unsure of the etiquette, perhaps it would be best
to ask Donald Becker directly for this hacked version.  There is
also a version of tulip-diag that uses the long EEPROM read,
so one can see quickly if that's really the issue for you.

I should mention that my setup works but has bad receive performance
(~20 kbyte/sec); I've been meaning to look further (something
interrupt-related is the guess).  Good enough for telnet, anyway.

> It seems that several other people have gotten this card to work well,

hm, that would argue against the large-EEPROM theory, if the other
cards are really identical to yours.

Cheers,
Peter Monta   pmonta@imedia.com
Imedia Corp.