[tulip] asix supported, or not? 2.4 problems

[Brett Dikeman]

Folks, I'm at about wits end here.

Setup is a dell laptop, kernel 2.4.18, and two 16-bit pcmcia 
nic's...both Linksys PCMPC100 cards(one is a V3, the other is a V2.)

I'm giving up on the Linux kernel module(axnet_cs); on one of the 
cards(the V3 I believe), I get tons and tons of errors under even 
slight(100kB/sec) load, eventually the interface just completely 
stops responding to the world(anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or 
two)...until I unplug it from the switch and plug it back in 
again(yes, the switch works fine, yes, I'm using a known good cable.) 
I get "next frame inconsistency" errors, along with "dropped" and 
"frame" errors according to ifconfig.  The other card does just fine 
under exactly the same load(the laptop is acting as a NATing gateway.)

I decided to give the tulip driver a try, since it supports(if I 
understand correctly) the chipset(s) used in both cards.  No matter 
what instructions I follow(-yes-, I've seen the instructions on the 
"update" page, and no, they don't work for me) I -cannot- get the 
tulip driver to see either card.  Under the 2.4 kernel pcmcia 
drivers, I get all sorts of unresolved symbol errors for pci-scan and 
cb_shim, and tulip.o dies with:
tulip.o: init_module: No such device
Hint: insmod errors can be caused by incorrect module parameters, 
including invalid IO or IRQ parameters

Under the pcmcia-cs package, all modules build and load without 
incident, including the tulip driver, but the driver doesn't attach 
to either card.  Nothing is printed in messages except a version 
information and URL to the tulip homepage.

After digging through outdated("2.4 is not stable and we do not 
recommend it for production systems"?!?) documentation, finding 
messages from others with similar problems, etc(I'm not the only one 
seeing this odd under-load error/dying interface problem)...I'm about 
ready to give up.

I've even tried switching to the pcmcia-cs package, which seems to 
have broken every pcmcia related script on the box.  Fixed that by 
going back to the kernel's pcmcia drivers...thankfully I've got basic 
functionality back.

What am I doing wrong here?  I've been using linux on laptops, with 
the tulip driver, for years, and all I remember was "compile, insmod, 
done"...I don't remember it being this hard :-)

Any help is much appreciated!

Brett
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