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

[Donald Becker]

On 9 Jan 2003, Emmanuel Viennet wrote:

> In fact, one of the card was in 100/FD and instead of NWAY autoneg.

These are mutually exclusive.
Autonegtiation happens on 10baseT link beat.
Forcing the card to 100-FDX will turn off autonegotiation.

It is possible to advertise only 100baseT-FDX, but that will not work if
the link partner is set to forced 100-FDX.

> I reset the EEPROM settings to Autoneg. and now it seems to work.

That is the correct configuration for the card.  Setting the EEPROM to
anything else will result in a repeat of the problems.

> By the way, what is the best diagnostic program for the 3c905C-TX ?
> 
> I tried mii-diag from http://www.scyld.com/diag/
> and it seems to display incorrect information.

What incorrect information?
Presumably this didn't happen with my driver release.

One potential problem is that the kernel has changed the interface
several times, and there is a on-going effort to break it again.

[[ That might sound inflammatory, but _changing_ an interface in a way
that it is pointlessly not backwards-compatible is _breaking_ it -- you
no longer have an interface, just a collection of code. ]]

> vortex-diag -mm  (found on the same site) seems to work.

..because it's isolated from the kernel changes.

> Is there a reason why mii-diag (which is included by many linux
> distribution) does not include the functionnalities of vortex-diag ?

They both use the same MII management information library and should
display the same transceiver information.  The vortex-diag program
directly accesses the chip registers, including the MII management
registers, and thus is not dependent on the kernel interface.  It can
also report other information about the chip's state.

The down-side is that vortex-diag must always be run as root, while
mii-diag can read the transceiver status as any user.

-- 
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