MX987xx NIC driver support

[Nick Edwards]

Hello,

Glad to hear from you. I have several of your adapters and I am quite
pleased with their performance in windows 95, however, the Linux support
is severely lacking.

Currently, people seem to be using the driver for the DEC Tulip 2X41X
cards. While this *works* in the strickest sense of the word, performance
is not good, packet duplications are common, and it is impossible for the
driver to work in any media mode except 10base half-duplex. 

The problem seems not to be with the register compatibility with the DEC
2141x, but rather with the fact that many cards with the MX chipsets do
not have full EEPROM tables. It is possible for the driver to include
vendor/chip specific programming for each card, and this has been done for
some other cards based on 2141x clones, etc.

The maintainer of the Linux 2141x driver is Donald Becker, a research
scientist at NASA. In addition to the Tulip driver, he has written many
other drivers for a myriad of Linux ethernet interfaces and is very highly
respected in the Linux community. I am not sure what his role is in
programming vendor-specific EEPROM information that would help to make the
MX cards more compatible, but you can certainly talk to him. His email
address is:

becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov
 
Again, thank you for your interest in the support of your chipset. There
are alot of ethernet vendors out there who are commited to not making
their programming information public for Linux support. I am sure that you
will see that working together with the Linux community will be the
fastest way to getting your products best supported and will benefit both
Linux users and your company.

Regards,

Nicholas Edwards

On Mon, 7 Sep 1998 stevechen@MXIC.COM.TW wrote:

> 
> Dear Sir,
>      My name is Steve Chen, system manager of Fast Ethernet
> product group of Macronix Internatinal Corp. Taiwan.
> 
> We provides many kinds of Fast Ethernet series product including NIC,
> Hub, Bridge and Switch controller.
> Most of them was already volume shiped into the market.
> You can find the details from the web site: http://www.mxic.com.tw.
> As you can find in this web site, Macronix alread provided a complete
> set of high quality drivers (except Linux) for easier and more efficient
> way to
> interface with MX987xx series NIC product. (MX98713, MX98715 & MX98725
> which are basicly 95% register level compatible with DEC21140)
> 
> How can I make it possible for these NICs as standard support by Linux ?
> Who will be the contact window for this kind of support ?
> 
> My email address: stevechen@mxic.com.tw
> Headquarter address:
>   Attention: Steve Chen, Dept 351
>   Macronix International Co., Ltd.
>   No. 3, Creation Road III
>   Science-based industrial Park, HsinChu
>   Taiwan
> 
> Looging forward to hearing from you soon.
> 
> Thanks & best regards,
> Steve Chen
> 
> 
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