21143 autonegotiate bug, and v0.91 progress report.
Donald Becker
becker@cesdis1.gsfc.nasa.gov
Wed Nov 25 18:17:42 1998
On Wed, 25 Nov 1998, Maurice Hilarius wrote:
> I earlier posted this problem, which many of us are having with a
> particular implementation of the Digital 21143PC chip on the Samsung/API UX
> Alpha motherboards.
> We have tried running this with the tulip V.90, and the DE4X5 drivers, as
> modules, and in the kernels. In each case we get the same thing:
> On startup the NIC tries to auto-negotiate for media type, floods the
> network with data, and never succeeds in detecting media type .
Here is a known bug list for v0.90 of tulip.c. All will be fixed in v0.91
A 21143 with a SYM transceiver will fail to properly switch to the
autonegotiated media type (it fails with 100baseTx-FD). This is the
bug I tracked down on Paralogic's cluster at SC98.
It's impossible to lock the media type of a 21040 chip -- it will always
switch to AUI when it loses 10baseT link beat.
The Kingston PNIC EEPROM uses byte-swapped addresses (grrr).
The latest 21143 CardBus cards use EEPROMs with 8 bit addresses, which
cannot be distinguished from the old 6 bit address EEPROMs (grrr). So
I'm basing the address length on the chip revision.
The driver release is being held up by my inability to boot the Netwinder
loaned to me by Corel -- I'll spend some time on it this weekend.
Donald Becker becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov
USRA-CESDIS, Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences.
Code 930.5, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD. 20771
301-286-0882 http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/people/becker/whoiam.html