[tulip] Only 1 port on a 21143 Quad.

[gemorga2]

Hmm, this product is interesting.  I was almost tasked at work to make exactly 
that product.  This was over 4 yrs ago.  Guess someone finally decided to make 
one.  You take a 5 port 10/100 switch chip, 4 magnetics chips and PHYs and put 
4 ports on the card.  These ports connect directly to the switch.  The 5th 
port is direct wired to an Ethernet MAC chip (Tulip in this case) which is 
connected to the PCI bus.  So, you build a small firewall and use the switch 
ports to connect your internal machines.  The uplink is the PCI interface and 
you put a second NIC in the machine for the "Internet" connection.  Or you 
could use any other suitable WAN/Dial up option.  This is probably the best 
use of the card.

The key word in the product name is "Switch".  A 4 port NIC would not have 
anything about switch in the name.  Do you have access to a scanner or digital 
camera with macro lense?  I'd like to get a look at this board.

Oh, and yes a "proper" 4 port card needs a MAC (21143 is a single port PCI to 
10/100 Ethernet Media Access Controller (MAC)) for each ethernet port.  Alas, 
we just recently discussed that a there is silicon available that has 4 
ethernet MAC chips combined into a single chip.  I doubt this was ever done 
for the Tulip design though.

A driver may get confused and think that there is more than one Ethernet 
interface on this card since there may be a second PCI "device" on the board 
for custom configuration of the switch ports (assuming there is some amount of 
management on the card for the switch).  This was also planned for the device 
I almost designed.  Nowadays a much cooler option would be to have a 4 port 
10/100 + 2 port 10/100/1000 ethernet switch on a PCI card.  Then you put a gig 
ethernet PCI interface on there and drop it in your server.  The card would 
have 5 ports on it, one being 10/100/1000 and the other 4 being 10/100.  You 
would connect your slower LAN segments to the 10/100 ports and have one high 
bandwidth port for some other purpose.  Might be a really big card to fit all 
that on it.  And I'm sure it would be expensive.  Enough rambling though...

>> Do you have only one 21143 chip?
>
>i re-checked, and i confirm that there is only one 21143 chip.
>
>> I think that you actually have a single port card, with a built-in
>> hub (repeater or switch).
>
>crumbs..
>
>the product name reads: 4-Port 10/100 NIC Switch.
>
>would a "proper" 4-port card need to have 4 21143 chips?
>
>> This appears to be a Ethernet switch chip. The only reference I found
>> was at http://www.mplusd.com/.
>
>hmm..
>
>is there then no way to get this card to work with anything more than
>1 port reliably (under linux)?
>
>one thing i ran into during my earlier testing was that (with one of
>the kernels i had running), if either one of de4x5 or tulip were
>compiled-in
>the kernel, and -the other- driver de4x5.o or tulip.o was loaded as
>a module, then it found 2 ports on the card (ie., i could assign ip
>addresses to eth0 and eth1).
>
>i'm not sure if this is expected behaviour, but i don't think i should run
>
>it in a production environment.
>
>assuming this card is a 4-port switch, not compatible with the tulip
>drivers, are there any suggestions you (plural :) can provide on how
>to get it to work, or what to do with it?
>
>:-)
>
>thanks for all your help so far,
>
>all the best,
>
>Vafa.
>______________________________________________
>
>Vafa Izadinia
>Lanier Europe B.V.
>Tel: +32 02/658.2430
>Fax: +32 02/672.7728
>______________________________________________
>
>
>
>
>Donald Becker <becker@scyld.com>
>12/06/2002 07:53
>
>
>        To:     <VIZADINI@lanier-europe.com>
>        cc:     <tulip@scyld.com>
>        Subject:        Re: [tulip] Only 1 port on a 21143 Quad.
>
>
>On Wed, 12 Jun 2002 VIZADINI@lanier-europe.com wrote:
>
>> > This PCI configuration space indicates that you have a single port
>21143
>> > card installed.  You do *not* have a bus bridge from a four port card.
>> > The bus bridge will typically be a 21050, 21052, 21150, or 21152 chip.
>> > Are you certain that you actually have a four port card installed?
>>
>> well.. i certainly hope it's a 4-port card..
>> that's what the item was marketed as, by BlackBox, that's what the
>> box and the manual say, and, in fact, there are four physical ports on
>> the card.
>
>> i21143PD
>
>Do you have only one 21143 chip?
>
>I think that you actually have a single port card, with a built-in
>hub (repeater or switch).
>
>> do you think there could be something wrong with the card then?
>>
>> from a previous posting; here are the names+numbers of all the chips i
>> could find on the card. in case it helps:
>
>> ADMtek OLIVE
>> LES105
>> 0053AAABR26753.1
>
>This appears to be a Ethernet switch chip. The only reference I found
>was at http://www.mplusd.com/.
>
>
>>
>> ALTIMA
>> 0136TN
>> AC101-QF
>
>This is is a Altima AC101 MII transciever.
>"0136" means the 36th week of 2001.
>
>
>
>--
>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
>
>
>
>
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George Morgan