Autonegotiation problems with 3c59x 0.99L and 3c905C?

[Bill Owens]

At 4:21 -0500 2/11/00, Ed P wrote:
>I have 3 3c905C boards and have seen the exact same thing with
>my aopen/p75 running RH6.1 and a 1 month old hp procurve 408 8 port switch.
>the stock rh61 driver (0.99H) connects at 10Mb half and vortex-diag
>says that the partner (switch) didn't complete autonegotiation.
>
>I've tried 0.99L (latest and greatest production) and 0.99N (L&G devel/test)
>with the same result.
>
>below,
>0xe880 is the first board. it's connected to the hp 408 switch
>and talking to a sun ultra5 (darwin) via the onboard hme 10/100 enet.
>the sun runs either sol26 or sol27 with the current set of reccomended
>patches.
>
>0xe800 is the 2nd board connected to a new netgear fs105 4 port
>fast ethernet switch. there are no other machines plugged into the
>netgrear.
>
>using the 3com gpl'ed linux driver (3c90x-1.0.0e) everything worked like
>a champ.
>
>Regards,
>Ed Pendzik
>edp@eznet.net

The output from your vortex-diag runs looks essentially identical to 
mine - the 3c59x 0.99L driver works fine, but won't auto-negotiate; 
the 3Com 3c90x driver will. Unfortunately, after I wrote my note, I 
discovered some problems with the 3Com driver. I can't nail it down 
completely, but it appears that after a large data transfer (I was 
testing with iperf, and a 20MB file over FTP), the driver sometimes 
causes the console to lock up. It affects both the character console 
and X windows. I have to blame the driver, since a ping to the 
machine suddenly causes it to respond again; stop the ping and it 
once again freezes.

I kept the ping running long enough to down the interface, rmmod the 
3c90x driver and insmod 3c59x instead. As before, that sequence (with 
no reboot in between) appears to allow the 3c59x driver to 
auto-negotiate correctly, and the machine has been working fine 
since. I have to suspect some difference in the way the two drivers 
initialize the board, but my limited programming skills aren't 
sufficient to the task of finding that difference.

Bill.
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