fun with tulip

Thu Feb 11 17:42:03 1999

We recently got stuck with some of the new Netgear 310 cards which came
with "non-Digital" chips on them. They DO work, to a degree, but slowly.
For interests sake we ran the latest tulip-daig on them, to see what we
could find out. Not being a God of this stuff, I can not tell too much from
it.
Here is the output, with a (few) comments:

tulip.c:v0.89H 5/23/98 becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov
eth0: Lite-On 82c168 PNIC at 0x8800, 00 a0 cc 39 90 4f, IRQ 17.
eth0:  MII transceiver found at MDIO address 1, config 1000 status 782d.
eth0:  Advertising 01e1 on PHY 1, previously advertising 01e1.
eth0: Changing PNIC configuration to half-duplex, CSR6 816e0000.

Ok, lets try 'tulip-diag'

# ./tulip-diag 
tulip-diag.c:v1.07 2/10/99 Donald Becker (becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov)
Unable to find a Tulip card in /proc/pci.
If there is a Tulip card in the machine, explicitly set the I/O port address
  using '-p <ioaddr>

Hm, ok. 'cat /proc/pci' gives indeed something like that:
.....
  Bus  0, device   7, function  0:
    Ethernet controller: LiteOn LNE100TX (rev 33).
      Medium devsel.  Fast back-to-back capable.  IRQ 17.
	  Master Capable.  Latency=32.  
      I/O at 0x8800 [0x8801].
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0x6001000 [0x6001000].
.....

# ./tulip-diag -p 0x8800
tulip-diag.c:v1.07 2/10/99 Donald Becker (becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov)
 Port selection is MII 100baseTx scrambler, half-duplex.
 Transmit started, Receive started, half-duplex.
  The Rx process state is 'Waiting for packets'.
  The Tx process state is 'Idle'.
  The transmit unit is set to store-and-forward.
 Use '-a' to show device registers,
     '-e' to show EEPROM contents,
  or '-m' to show MII management registers.
# ./tulip-diag -p 0x8800 -m
tulip-diag.c:v1.07 2/10/99 Donald Becker (becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov)
 Port selection is MII 100baseTx scrambler, half-duplex.
 Transmit started, Receive started, half-duplex.
  The Rx process state is 'Waiting for packets'.
  The Tx process state is 'Idle'.
  The transmit unit is set to store-and-forward.
 ***WARNING***: No MII transceivers found!

Oh, really?? The driver itself claims otherwise.

# ./tulip-diag -p 0x8800 -a -f
tulip-diag.c:v1.07 2/10/99 Donald Becker (becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov)
Digital Tulip, unknown type Tulip chip registers at 0x8800:
  0000e000 01ff0000 00000000 47885818 47885a18 02660010 816e2002 0001ebef
  00000000 00004800 47885a38 47109068 00000025 00000000 00000000 10000001
 Port selection is MII 100baseTx scrambler, half-duplex.
 Transmit started, Receive started, half-duplex.
  The Rx process state is 'Waiting for packets'.
  The Tx process state is 'Idle'.
  The transmit unit is set to store-and-forward.
# ./tulip-diag -p 0x8800 -e    
tulip-diag.c:v1.07 2/10/99 Donald Becker (becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov)
 Port selection is MII 100baseTx scrambler, half-duplex.
 Transmit started, Receive started, half-duplex.
  The Rx process state is 'Waiting for packets'.
  The Tx process state is 'Idle'.
  The transmit unit is set to store-and-forward.
  * An old-style EEPROM layout was found.
  * The old-style layout does not contain transceiver control information.
  * This board may not work, or may work only with a subset of transceiver
  * options or data rates.

Not that I am a tiny bit wiser after that (except that this board does work,
at least here, as I am connected through it when typing these words :-).

If this is of any use to Donald, or others, great!
BTW, this was run on an Alpha: Cabriolet - 21064A / 275MHz machine. Linux
2.0.36.

Best regards,

  Maurice W. Hilarius             NEW!  Telephone: 01-780-456-9771
  Hard Data Ltd.                  NEW!  FAX:       01-780-456-9772
  11060 - 166 Avenue                    email:maurice@harddata.com
  Edmonton, AB, Canada  - T5X 1Y3       http://www.harddata.com