Troubles with a 3C905B-TX at 10Mb/s too!
Paolo Saggese
Paolo.Saggese@lngs.infn.it
Wed Oct 13 05:27:05 1999
Hi,
I had lot's of troubles with a 3C905B-TX as well!!!
(running at 10 Mb/s, haven't had a chance to try it at 100Mb/s).
The configuration was painless, the driver loads just fine, but the
good news ends here. Transfer rates were ridicolous (network was up
but practically unusable), and there where lots of lost packets even
pinging from/to another machine attached to the same hub/repeater
(a DECrepeater 90T-16) and with almost 0 network load.
Even working on a telnet connection to a remote host (on the same
LAN) was a royal pain! Every few keystrokes, the network seem to
hang and come back only some seconds later... and so on and on...
I have tryed almost any version of the driver, from the stock one
coming with the Mandrake 6.0 Kernel (2.2.9) to the latest available,
and different Kernels as well (including RedHat's 6.0 2.2.5, and the
kernel-2.2.13-7mdk coming with Mandrake 6.1) but have experienced no
substantial difference either.
The situation went a little bit better using 3com's driver, but was
not really solved either.
I have also tryed to change PCI slot (that changed the IRQ line that
was assigned to the NIC), to disable the on-board sound card, etc,
but no success.
(oh, how much do I miss the nice days when there were all those
beautiful jumpers on the cards!!! 8-)
I have tested my 3C905B-TX on another PC with Linux, and had exactly
the same troubles. I have also installed it on a winbug 95 PC, and it
worked just fine there.
(all these PCs are in the same room, connected to the same repeater;
I have also tryed to swap net cables and wall sockets, but no change-
the problem appears always on Linux machines, no problem on windoze).
Now I have swapped in a a 10Mb/s 3c900B-TPO NIC and with it everything
works fine with either driver.
[but since there will be an network upgrade here sooner or later, I do
need a 10/100 NIC!]
This is the config. of my PC:
- motherboard Intel BI440ZX, 128Mb RAM (2 x 64M DIMMs);
- CPU Intel Celeron 366;
- 8.4Gb Quantum fireball IDE/U-DMA 66 HDD;
- Matrox G200 AGP, (cheap one, no 3D accelerators, etc);
- SCSI controller AdvanSys ABP9xxU "PCI Fast and Ultra SCSI Bus Master";
- 3C905B-TX PCI NIC.
And here are some (hopefully useful) data:
[please forgive me for the length of this msg... :( ]
[pcsaggese ~]% cat /proc/interrupts
CPU0
0: 5699250 XT-PIC timer
1: 18676 XT-PIC keyboard
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
5: 0 XT-PIC es1371
8: 1 XT-PIC rtc
9: 1651745 XT-PIC eth0
10: 59 XT-PIC advansys
12: 68934 XT-PIC PS/2 Mouse
13: 1 XT-PIC fpu
14: 3980199 XT-PIC ide0
NMI: 0
[root@pcsaggese tmp]# cat /proc/ioports
0000-001f : dma1
0020-003f : pic1
0040-005f : timer
0060-006f : keyboard
0070-007f : rtc
0080-008f : dma page reg
00a0-00bf : pic2
00c0-00df : dma2
00f0-00ff : fpu
01f0-01f7 : ide0
02f8-02ff : serial(auto)
03c0-03df : vga+
03f6-03f6 : ide0
03f8-03ff : serial(auto)
e800-e80f : advansys
ec00-ec7f : eth0
ef00-ef3f : es1371
ffa0-ffa7 : ide0
ffa8-ffaf : ide1
[root@pcsaggese tmp]# lsmod
Module Size Used by
3c59x 20008 1 (autoclean)
loop 7552 2 (autoclean)
advansys 67472 1
autofs 8996 1 (autoclean)
nfs 37688 1 (autoclean)
nfsd 143768 1 (autoclean)
lockd 30920 1 (autoclean) [nfs nfsd]
sunrpc 53348 1 (autoclean) [nfs nfsd lockd]
nls_iso8859-1 2020 2 (autoclean)
nls_cp437 3548 1 (autoclean)
vfat 9180 1 (autoclean)
fat 30176 1 (autoclean) [vfat]
es1371 23852 1
soundcore 2372 4 [es1371]
Aug 9 11:50:38 pcsaggese kernel: 3c59x.c:v0.99L 5/28/99 Donald Becker
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html
Aug 9 11:50:38 pcsaggese kernel: eth0: 3Com 3c905B Cyclone 100baseTx at
0xec00, 00:50:04:4b:33:1a, IRQ 9
Aug 9 11:50:38 pcsaggese kernel: 8K byte-wide RAM 5:3 Rx:Tx split,
autoselect/Autonegotiate interface.
Aug 9 11:50:38 pcsaggese kernel: Media override to transceiver type 0
(10baseT).
Aug 9 11:50:38 pcsaggese kernel: Enabling bus-master transmits and
whole-frame receives.
Aug 9 11:50:38 pcsaggese kernel: eth0: Media override to transceiver 0
(10baseT).
Oh, and I got tons of these errors on system log:
Aug 15 14:39:42 pcsaggese kernel: 0<7>eth0: interrupt, status e201, latency 2
ticks.
Aug 15 18:34:24 pcsaggese kernel: 7<7>eth0: interrupt, status e201, latency 50
ticks.
Aug 16 13:22:25 pcsaggese kernel: t<7>eth0: interrupt, status e201, latency 2
ticks.
Aug 16 23:33:14 pcsaggese kernel: i<7>eth0: interrupt, status e201, latency 2
ticks.
Aug 17 02:36:52 pcsaggese kernel: t<7>eth0: interrupt, status e201, latency 2
ticks.
Aug 17 05:39:11 pcsaggese kernel: r<7>eth0: interrupt, status e201, latency 3
ticks.
Hope it helps!
Thanks in advance.
Ciao,
Paolo.
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