[vortex-bug] Problems with 3c905c

[Donald Becker]

On Sun, 14 May 2000 r_c_edgar@hotmail.com wrote:

> I've got a machine with two 3c905c's that keep giving me this:

This is a either a transmit issue (see a later email) or a bus master
problem.

> I've tried it with only 1 netcard, and with some spares I have.  I've
> switched out the motherboard (tried it on 3 different now - two bx and
> one i810).  the problem isn't with the individual pieces of hardware...

The pretty much rules out a bus-master problem -- you might select a bogus
slot once, but usually not twice in a row.

> Also, the 10mbit light on the backs of the cards is _always_ on, even
> when not plugged in or plugged into my 100mbit switch.  This only
> happens when the driver is loaded ; when the driver is not loaded the
> light does what it's supposed to.

This is because of a change in how the EEPROM media selection field is used.

The proper media type for this card is always NWay-autoselect, and that used
to be what was in the EEPROM media selection field.

But since that's always the proper media type on the new cards, the field is
now used to indicate a forced media type.  (I believe that the hardware has
been changed to not automatically load that EEPROM field into the media
selection register.)

The driver should have the flag HAS_NWAY for the chip types that have this
change.  Most driver versions do not!  (Even though I explicitly added the
code to handle this case, I didn't add it to the chip table everywhere.)

The detection line should read:
	{"3c905C Tornado",{ 0x920010B7, 0xffffffff },
	 PCI_IOTYPE, CYCLONE_SIZE, IS_TORNADO|HAS_NWAY, },
                                             ^^^^^^^^^

This same effect -- forcing 10baseT only -- can be see when you provide a
bad media type option.

> I'm running kernel 2.2.15 with the 'P' version of the driver.  I've
> tried with several other kernels, and none of them work either...  Any
> idea what's going on ?


Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210
Annapolis MD 21403