[tulip] Slow Linksys Etherfast 10/100 PCMCIA speeds

[Donald Becker]

On Fri, 5 Jan 2001, sc wrote:

> - Debian 2.2.17 on a ThinkPad T20 with a Linksys 10/100 EtherFast PCMCIA 
> card.

Is this a PCMCIA card, or a CardBus card?
What is the part number and the detection message?

> Problem:
> - Slow network speeds 5-10 KB / s on multi megabyte file exchanges.  File 
> sizes < 400 K work ok but performance takes a big hit afterwards.
...
> - ifconfig is showing a large number of collisions : 10-17% of RX packets
> - cardctl shows at least recognizes the card as a Linksys Etherfast 
> 10/100 card
> - cardinfo shows it as an NE2K compatible card.  

If this is correct, you have a PCMCIA NE2000 clone, not a tulip-based card.

A PCMCIA card *will* use up a lot of CPU time and be very slow, although not
as slow as you report.

With a T20 you really should be using a CardBus card.  And the Linksys
CardBus card will use the Tulip driver, so we can help you here.

> - For some reason, at a LAN that I set up at work, the network speeds 
> from the DSL-connected router are excellent.  However, at 2 other LANs 
> that I set up similar to the one at work, I get awful network speeds.  
> The networks aren't anything fancy, just a few vanilla 10 Mb hubs 
> connected together.

This points to some sort of media selection problem.

> running into snags with the compilation of the module.  Keep on getting a 
> modversions.h not found.

This indicates inconsistent header files.
BTW, you should no longer need to pass -DMODVERSIONS as a compile option.

  When I place the modversions.h from my 
> kernel-headers 2.2.17 in a place where the compilation of tulip.c can 
> find it (/usr/include/linux/), I get a ton of misc. files not found 

Bad, bad, bad.  The modversions.h file is constructured specifically for
your exact kernel version.  Copying it from another machine will never
work.

Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993