[tulip] asix supported, or not? 2.4 problems

[Donald Becker]

On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, Brett Dikeman wrote:

> Setup is a dell laptop, kernel 2.4.18, and two 16-bit pcmcia 
> nic's...both Linksys PCMPC100 cards(one is a V3, the other is a V2.)

The 16 bit cards are NE2000 clones.  Although PCMCIA has the capability
to operate at 8MB/sec transfer rate, most implementation operate as
slower than ISA speeds (5.33MB/sec).

The ASIX chip is basically a NE2000 design, with a faster serializer and
a MII transceiver.  You shouldn't expect much more than 10Mbps performance.

> cards(the V3 I believe), I get tons and tons of errors under even 
> slight(100kB/sec) load, eventually the interface just completely 
> stops responding to the world(anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or 
> two)...

That shouldn't happen.  Check that the link partner isn't set to
forced-full-duplex mode.

> I decided to give the tulip driver a try, since it supports(if I 
> understand correctly) the chipset(s) used in both cards.

Nope.  The Tulip driver supports the 88140 ASIX chip, which is a
32 bit chip with a completely different design.

> I've even tried switching to the pcmcia-cs package, which seems to 
> have broken every pcmcia related script on the box.

For years the PCMCIA-cs system was the standard.  When the functionality
was gradually moved into the kernel, the interface changed repeatedly.

> What am I doing wrong here?  I've been using linux on laptops, with 
> the tulip driver, for years, and all I remember was "compile, insmod, 
> done"...I don't remember it being this hard :-)

-- 
Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
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