[vortex] Problems with 3c509C and boot-time autoconfiguration

[Daniel Burrows]

  Hopefully I have the right mailing list..

  I'm having some trouble getting boot-time interface configuration to work
with a 3c509C card.  I believe that the card is the problem, because the same
setup works perfectly with a machine that has a different network card.

  I have a system with a 3Com 3c905C Tornado card that I'd like to boot off of
the network.  Another system on the network provides DHCP service, TFTP, and
NFS.  The first stage of the boot process works perfectly: Grub sees the
netweork card, requests an address via DHCP, receives it, and fetches the
kernel via DHCP.  The kernel is then booted with the arguments:

root=/dev/nfs ip=dhcp nfsroot=/usr/local/slave/fs

  I've tried this on another system, with an NE2K-PCI card.  On that one, the
boot process runs perfectly: the kernel gets an IP address using DHCP, mounts
its root over NFS, and continues.

  On the 3Com system, however, the boot hangs forever at the step of getting
an address via DHCP.  Using tcpdump to view network traffic reveals that no
packets are coming from the system with the 3Com card.  If I manually specify
an IP address (with the ip= parameter), everything works fine.
  I've fiddled with a few variables: fetching the kernel from a floppy instead
of using TFTP, twiddling the value of "PnP OS" in the BIOS, etc, but to no
avail.

  This really looks to me like a quirk of the 3Com driver, and I hope someone
here can help me out.  If not, please point me to the correct place to ask,
and I'll go bug them :)

   Thanks,
  Daniel