[vortex] 3c905C-TX : not working in 100Mbps / Full Duplex ?

[Emmanuel Viennet]

Hi,

we use 3COM 3c905C-TX PCI adapters under
linux 2.4.18 (RedHat 8.0 or 7.3), using
3c59x driver module.

It works fine in 10 Mbps half-duplex, but we could'nt set it to 100/Full
Duplex.

The adapter is connected directly to a CISCO 2900 10/100 switch.

We can't get setup a correct connexion at 100/FD.

We tried the following:
 - switch auto-negociating, card auto-negociating

 - switch forced to 100/FD, card forced 
   (either with options 3c59x options=0x0200
    or options 3c59x options=4 full_duplex=1
    or even using   mii-tool -F 100baseTx-FD )


In all cases, we get "carrier errors", as in this example:

eth1      Lien encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:04:75:C8:6B:B6  
          inet adr:10.10.0.1  Bcast:10.10.255.255  Masque:255.255.0.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:3421953 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:1 frame:0
          TX packets:2794227 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0
carrier:2793937
          collisions:0 lg file transmission:100 
          RX bytes:980768562 (935.3 Mb)  TX bytes:2223140870 (2120.1 Mb)
          Interruption:5 Adresse de base:0xe880 


Connectivity is OK, but paquets are loosed, and NFS performance
is very poor.

We tried this on several PC, several 3COM cards and several switches
with the same results...
The same setup works perfectly with Ethernet Pro 100 (eepro100) or
older 3COM cards (905B).


Any advice ? (we have a *lot* of 905C-TX and feel quite desesperated...)

Emmanuel