[vortex] Problem whit an old 3c905B-Tx

[Donald Becker]

On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Alessandro Villani wrote:

>   I'm trying to use a 3C905B-Tx in a dual Pentium III Pc together with an
..
>   The problem is the following: using dhcp to configure the card the system is
>   unable to configure saying  that there is a network cable problem. If I
>   configure the network card by hand everything works well.
>   Moreover, the 3com card speed is always 10Mb instead of 100Mb.

This is the first clue.

>   3c59x: Donald Becker and others. www.scyld.com/network/vortex.html
>   See Documentation/networking/vortex.txt
>   00:09.0: 3Com PCI 3c905B Cyclone 100baseTx at 0xd000. Vers LK1.1.18-ac
>   PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:09.0 to 64
>    00:10:5a:05:c8:61, IRQ 9
>     product code 5146 rev 00.9 date 06-27-98
>     Internal config register is 0000, transceivers 0xa.
>     8K byte-wide RAM 5:3 Rx:Tx split, 10baseT interface.

Hmmm, it appears that either
  - your card is programmed to use only the 10baseT transceiver, or
  - you are passing an invalid transceiver-setting option


>   The output of ./vortex-diag -a is:

What does "vortex-diag -eee"  report?
That will show us the EEPROM setting.

>    Transceiver/media interfaces available:  100baseTx 10baseT.
>   Transceiver type in use:  10baseT.

Yup, the transceiver type for this board is "NWay".  Any other setting
will put the board into 10baseT, non-autonegotiate mode.


[[ Quick poll: I've been considering changing the configuration EEPROM
report.  The current semantics are
   -e  Show the interpreted settings
   -ee  Also show the whole EEPROM contents numerically
   -eee  For EEPROM values that look like ASCII, print the characters at the
         end of each numeric output line.
Should all three types of output be shown with a single "-e"?
]]


>   Can you help me? There is some settings to add to /etc/modules.conf
>   I've tried with options=4 but the problem was the same (only that if I
>   remove the 3c90x module and reinstall it by hand using ismod than the speed
>   switch to 100Mb ...)

This really sounds as if you have an option in /etc/modules.conf.
The driver is designed to work with _no_ options.
The only reason to pass an option is to work around a specific flaw in
your environment or configuration.

-- 
Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Scyld Beowulf cluster system
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993