bad perf - corrupted EEPROM ???

Thu Dec 3 20:57:28 1998

We have a couple of 3c905 card in our little Beowulf.
All work fine, report themselves as FastEth, but one of them shows
awful performance as shown by netpipe. If the blocksize goes over 8kbytes
thougput tops out at 10 Mbit/s. The other cards do 80 Mbit/s.

This card is older, in a Dell machine we attached to the cluster later.
All machines run plain vanilla RH5.1. 
I do not think that the different machines can cause such a difference.

However, I had tinkered with this card earlier. It was linked with a long
cable to the hub and that hit a bug in the transceiver. With help from
Donald we got it up operational then. I suspect I messed up something.
I include the output from vortex-diag -aaVv here. I suspect the force 
full-duplex option to be the culprit.

Is that true? What should I do to fix it? 
Thanks:		Gabor Magyarfalvi

vortex-diag.c:v1.05 5/22/98 Donald Becker (becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov)
Found a 3Com PCI Ethernet 3c905 rev 0 at 0xff00.
The Vortex chip may be active, so FIFO registers will not be read.
To see all register values use the '-f' flag.
Initial window 7, registers values by window:
  Window 0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 00bf ffff 0000.
  Window 1: FIFO FIFO 0000 2000 8000 00ff 13fc 2000.
  Window 2: 6000 3a08 0f1e 0000 0000 0000 06c6 4000.
  Window 3: 02d8 0063 0000 0020 e040 0bff 13ff 6000.
  Window 4: 0000 06d0 0000 0cc0 0003 8802 0000 8000.
  Window 5: 1ffc fffc 06c6 0600 0007 069e 06c6 a000.
  Window 6: 0000 0000 0000 2700 2000 1196 0f9e c000.
  Window 7: 23a8 03b9 0000 0000 8000 00ff 500c e000.
Vortex chip registers at 0xff00
  0xFF10: **FIFO** **FIFO** 00008000 000013fc
  0xFF20: 00000021 00000000 033e561e 06000036
  0xFF30: 00000000 00007d22 03b92240 00000000
 No interrupt sources are pending.
 Transceiver/media interfaces available:  MII.
 MAC settings: full-duplex.
EEPROM contents:
  0060 083a 1e0f 9050 c2fe 0036 4b4b 6d50
  0418 0000 0060 083a 1e0f 8010 0000 0000
  10a6 0000 02d8 0063 0000 0003 0000 0077
  ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
  ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
  ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
  ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
  ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
 The word-wide EEPROM checksum is 0xf1cc.
Parsing the EEPROM of a 3Com Vortex/Boomerang:
 3Com Node Address 00:60:08:3A:1E:0F (used as a unique ID only).
 OEM Station address 00:60:08:3A:1E:0F (used as the ethernet address).
 Manufacture date (MM/DD/YY) 7/30/97, division 6, product KK.
Options: force full-duplex.
  Vortex checksum is 77 (vs. 77),Cyclone checksum is 00 (vs. ffff).
 MII PHY found at address 24, status 786f.
 MII PHY 0 at #24 transceiver registers:
   3100 786f 2000 5c01 0141 0081 0000 0000
   0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
   0000 0000 0000 0001 0000 0000 0001 8060
   8020 0c38 0000 1800 a3b9 008d 1705 001d.