[realtek] NIC boots up with 10BaseT-HD and needs manual reinit

Donald Becker becker@scyld.com
Sun, 8 Jul 2001 14:55:51 -0400 (EDT)


On Sun, 8 Jul 2001, Christian Hammers wrote:

> Probably after playing around with mii-diag or maybe after a kernel upgrade
> from 2.4.x to 2.4.5,2.4.5-ac9 and now 2.4.6, my RTL-8139B begun to boot up
> in 10BaseT-HD,no_auto_sense mode and this giving me no net access.

The 'mii-diag' program (and other programs that use the MII ioctl()
calls) cannot persistently change the transceiver setting.

The change was almost certainly your kernel update.

> It took
> me a while to figure out what was happened but no I can at least get it
> work by putting a "/sbin/mii-tool -r" in the init script.
> 
> Does anybody know how to make the card initialize in 100BaseT-FD or better
> autosening mode after startup again?

Figure out what changed in the driver initialization.  I'm guessing it's
the change in the init_etherdev() semantics for LILO parameters.  This
interface change was discussed in the netdev mailing list, as usual only
after the change was made.

Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993