[vortex] Problems with TX underruns in 2.4.9

[James Yonan]

> James Yonan wrote:
> >
> > ...
> > EEPROM contents (64 words, offset 0):
> >  0x000: 00a0 245b 739d 5950 c03c 0036 5542 6d50
> >  0x008: 0418 0000 00a0 245b 739d 3f10 0000 0000
> >  0x010: 11c6 0000 001b 0101 0000 0000 0000 0016
>           ^^^^
>
> This seems to be the problem.  Bit 5, which tells the driver that
> this card can do bus mastering is not set.
>
> What I suggest you do is to edit the device driver, around line
> 1295:
>
>     if (vp->capabilities & CapBusMaster) {
>
> and just make this
>
>     if (1) {
>
> then see if that works.  If it does, then you'll need to reprogram the
> eeprom to enable busmastering.  The most practical way of doing this is
> with 3com's DOS-based configuration tool.
>
> ftp://ftp.3com.com/pub/nic/3c90x/3c90xx2.exe

Hey, thanks for the info!  A couple more questions:

1. I actually have 3 ethernet cards on this system, eth0 is a cyclone, eth1
is a vortex (the problem card), and eth2 is a vortex (not stress tested
yet).  Is busmastering a card-independent function, i.e. can they all be
masters, or must I only set one bus master, and if so, which should be the
master.

2. Is the busmastering issue relevant because I have two vortices... would
the problem go away if I only had one vortex + one cyclone?

3. Unfortunately I don't have DOS... is there a way to do this on linux?

Thanks!

James Yonan
Boulder, Colorado, USA