The NEW Kingston KNE100TX? Reliable?

[John Connett]

Many thanks to those who sent comments in reply to my message.  I'm
beginning to think that the NEW Kingston KNE100TX may be a reasonable
substitute for the old 21140 based part.  If anyone has firm evidence to
the contrary please let me know!

There seems to be some confusion about the ways that the 21143 is used
with a transceiver to make a controller.  There are two classes of
transceiver that can be used: MII or SYM.  More details can be found on
the Tulip driver development page.

My initial experiences of the 21143 was with the onboard ethernet
controller on Alpha Ruffian (UX) motherboards.  This is an example of a
controller using a SYM transceiver (a Quality Semiconductor QS6611).  In
this combination, autonegotiation is handled by the 21143 and driver
software.  With earlier versions of the Tulip driver this combination
exhibited autonegotiation problems.  As a work around we used an OLD
Kingston KNE100TX based on the 21140 and ignored the onboard controller.

The NEW Kingston KNE100TX is an example of a controller using an MII
transceiver (a SEEQ 80220).  With this combination the autonegotiation
is handled by hardware in the transceiver.

To decide if the NEW Kingston KNE100TX is a reliable replacement for the
old one requires the answers to a couple of questions:

1) Are 21143 + MII transceiver controllers (in particular the SEEQ
80220) reliable?

2) Are the register differences between the 21143-xD and earlier
variants backwards compatible or benign with regard to the Tulip driver?

I would be most grateful if those with a greater depth of knowledge of
this area could provide answers to these questions.

If the NEW Kingston KNE100TX is a worthy successor to the very reliable
old model it would be good to make that known.  Conversely, if there are
any problems it would be good to know that before many users (me
included) get caught!

Thanks again
--
John Connett (jrc@art.co.uk)