Alpha 164UX

[Donald Becker]

On Tue, 27 Apr 1999, Maurice Hilarius wrote:

> With regards to your message at 03:17 PM 04-27-99 +0200, Albrecht Jacobs.
> Where you stated:
> We too have this problem. Currently we have 76 machines in build, and there
> appears to be several hundred UX with this problem out there. The hardware
> DOES work with the NT drivers supplied by API, so the hardware CAN function.
> We have offered to send a machine to Donald Becker. He has not replied, so
> I take it he is either not available, or does ot care to tackle this..

I thought that v0.91 fixed this problem.
Shipping machines around is such high overhead..


> >On Tue, 27 Apr 1999, Grahame Jordan wrote:
> >> I have a couple of Alpha 164UX mother boards that have on board DEC
> >> 21143 Ethernet
> >> Controllers.
..
> >> I had this trouble with the tulip driver that came with RedHat on intel
> >> using kernel
> >> 2.2.3, but overcame the problem with an updated tulip.c, 0.90z.

v0.91 wasn't tremendously different than v0.90z.
Well, at least it wasn't too different than v0.90zzzzz, which I sent to a
few people before I released v0.91.

> >Donald Becker: could you PLEASE give a statement to this problem. As far
> >as I know until now it is hardware related. Is there a way to overcome
> >this by software (speak: tulip.c)??

My current guess: it's an issue with the 21143-TC (non-TD) chip when there
isn't an input ping specified to detect 100baseTx link beat.

> >I am VERY interested in solving this for our machine shall be a network
> >server--and there must be hundreds of UX owners with similar problems!

It's one of four issues remaining with v0.91 before I make it v1.00.  This
is the list I reported to Alan Cox today
  - reworked EEPROM read code (done)
  - reworked suspend/resume (in testing)
  - forcing 21041 media settings (?)
  - and tracking down an on-Alpha-motherboard media selection problem.

(1) detecting the EEPROM address size
(2) For CardBus cards. v0.91 is more broken than earlier versions.
(3) I'll check this out later today.
(4) The 164UX problem.

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