[tulip] Netgear FA310-TX NIC problems

Donald Becker becker@scyld.com
Mon, 10 Jul 2000 10:59:00 -0400 (EDT)


On Mon, 10 Jul 2000, A.J. Rossini wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Jul 2000, Donald Becker wrote:
> > On Mon, 10 Jul 2000, A.J. Rossini wrote:
> > 
> > > I'm seeing similar problems as previously reported, with the FA310TX 
> > Which version of the FA310TX?

I'm asking because the "FA310TX" name refers to three or four different
chips and transceiver configurations.

> Here's what I can tell:
> # ./tulip-diag -m -m 
> Index #1: Found a Lite-On 82c168 PNIC adapter at 0xde00.
>  Port selection is MII, half-duplex.

This is either the second or third generation PNIC-I design.
It's probably the third generation, a '169 with an external MII transceiver.

>  Transmit started, Receive started, half-duplex.
>   The Rx process state is 'Waiting for packets'.
>   The Tx process state is 'Idle'.
>   The transmit threshold is 72.

This is normal.

>  MII PHY found at address 1, status 0x782d.
>  MII PHY #1 transceiver registers:
>    3000 782d 0040 6212 01e1 0021 0000 0000
>  Vendor ID is 00:10:18:--:--:--, model 33 rev. 2.
>    No specific information is known about this transceiver type.

If it's easy to look at the board itself, what is the brand and part number
of the transceiver?  (Probably unimportant, but I'll see if I can add it to
libmii.c).

> > What is the detection message?
> tulip.c:v0.92 4/17/2000  Written by Donald Becker <becker@scyld.com>
>   http://www.scyld.com/network/tulip.html
> eth0: Lite-On 82c168 PNIC rev 32 at 0xcc843f00, 00:A0:CC:65:E6:AE, IRQ 10.
> eth0:  MII transceiver #1 config 3000 status 7829 advertising 01e1.

Ahhh, rev. 32, definitely a '169 with the fixed MII register hardware.

> > You should try v92.
> Tried and failed with the same problem.
> 	 eth0: Transmit timeout using MII device.
> Index #1: Found a Lite-On 82c168 PNIC adapter at 0xde00.
>  Port selection is MII, half-duplex.
>  Transmit started, Receive started, half-duplex.
>   The Rx process state is 'Waiting for packets'.
>   The Tx process state is 'Waiting for Tx to finish'.
>   The transmit threshold is 72.

OK, the transmitter is waiting to be able to transmit.
Either the chip thinks the media is busy, or something has gone wrong.
The PCI transfer unit is likely OK, and interrupts are getting through.
(The latter is an important point -- our BP6 cluster nodes pretty
consistently forget how to handle interrupts after a few days unless we turn
off the flaky APIC code with "noapic".)

>  MII PHY #1 transceiver registers:
>    3000 782d 0040 6212 01e1 0021 0000 0000

Hmmm, looks normal.

> (note that the top portion of tulip-diag scrolled off my screen too fast,
> but it basically said the same thing as before, wrt tulip diag.)

I'll need the output from 'tulip-diag -af'.  It's easiest to do
  tulip-diag -af  > /tmp/t-d-working
then
  tulip-diag -af  > /tmp/t-d-broken

Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Beowulf Clusters / Linux Installations
Annapolis MD 21403