[tulip] Weird problem with Conexant

[Felipe Contreras]

On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 07:23:35PM -0400, Donald Becker wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> 
> > Subject: [tulip] Weird problem with Conexant
> > 
> > I have a weird problem when conecting via an ethernet cross cable to a
> > CNET PRO200, now running windows 2000.
> > 
> > This is what ifconfig says:
> > eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:50:8B:AA:F6:C1
> >           TX packets:1 errors:3334 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:3817
> >           collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
> 
> This is "normal" for a conexant in full duplex mode.
> The Conexant chip reports constant carrier errors when set to FDX.  The
> packets are sent correctly, as indicated by the '0' collision count.

So how do I switch to half duplex?

> > This is an extract of what tulip-diag says:
> >  Port selection is MII, full-duplex.
> >  Transmit started, Receive started, full-duplex.
> >   The Rx process state is 'Waiting for packets'.
> >   The Tx process state is 'Idle'.
> >   The transmit threshold is 128.
> 
> Please send the whole output, although it doesn't matter here.

Which options do you want?

> > The weird part is that I can actually use the driver as if it was
> > working fine except that the windows machine keeps saying that the
> > conection goes down, an then goes up, and that happends more often when
> > I'm comsuming cpu power.
> 
> Hmmm, I haven't seen any problem with the implementation on the Compaq
> 1700 series.

It's a fact, when I'm using 100% of the processor the link can stay for
more than a few seconds. Only with the cross cable.

> > Also sometimes I get good pings, but most of
> > the times I got them corrupted. This also happened with my old Davicom
> > card, it was just coincide that my new CNET card use the same chipset
> > now I wonder if it was really broken or was a driver problem.
> 
> Check your cable.
> The early Davicom chips had a significant problem with generating and
> detecting bad packets.  But I suspect a mispaired or otherwise bad cable.

I think you were right, it seems the cable was a little  bad, but
anyway I get the same problems with a new cross cable I did, 1-3, 2-6,
so it must be something on the card.