[vortex] 3c509B card loses link

[Donald Becker]

On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Uncle George wrote:

> Is there a group that can resolve network issues with a xircom pcmcia 
> ce3b-100 credit card.

Probably not.  Many Xircom cards use Xircom-designed chips.  Xircom
hasn't been helpful with documentation, especially the work-arounds to
the chip bugs.

> I got a netgear 32bit FA511 kard, and that runs flawlessly, up to the 
> point where the transfer process runs out of disk space. It also 
> transfers over 1000kbytes/sec where the xircom kard ( 16bit ) does 
> about 700-800kbytes/sec.

And the CardBus card did that as a high-bandwidth bus master with a
trivial CPU load, while the 16 bit card was likely using almost 100% of
the CPU reading and writing data one word at a time.

> I suppose that the xfer speed maxes out at 16bit,  but it really should 
> not case the connection to drop.

That's likely a bug with recovering from Rx overruns or Tx underruns.
It's easy write a driver that operates when everything is going
according to plan, but you need the proper documentation and weeks of
testing to correctly handle error cases.


-- 
Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
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