Allnet 8832 problems

[Tobias Abt]

Dies ist eine mehrteilige Nachricht im MIME-Format.
--------------B7B67EAF597AB560E40E50CE
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hi!

I need some help, please! I am new on this list and I hope this belongs
here. If not, tell me where to ask, thank you!

I own a "Allnet ALL8832 N-Way 10/100 PCI Fast Ethernet" card which
features a DEC 21143 chip and BNC (10base2) as well as TP (10baseT
and 100baseTX) connectors.

With older tulip.c drivers (at least upto 0.89) the card does not work
at all, these days I got the 0.91e version and this one works with the
BNC port, but not with TP.

The other driver for this chip set, the de4x5, is able to use it with TP,
but not BNC...

Here at home I mainly use a BNC network, but I would like to help to get
the tulip driver support TP on my card, too.

Now, there are some peculiarities with the way card and driver interact:
- when the tulip module is started, it complains "*** warning, no MII
  transceiver found!" (BTW, what does this MII stand for?)
- when I use BNC and start the tulip driver without options like this:
  "insmod tulip ; ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.2" and use another machine to
  ping this computer I may get 5 responses once but then no more. The
  /var/log/messages tells me that it tries various MII-modes but does
  not lock on the BNC port although it already had transmissions working
  there.
- when I use BNC and start the driver with options=X (with X=1-8,12 i.e.
  any non-MII option), the card works perfectly on the BNC port. This I
  find a bit strange... :-)
- when I use TP (10baseT), no matter what option I use, I never get any
  ping response on the other computer

On the other hand, the card works perfectly in every mode under Windows98
with the standard Windows98 distribution driver for "PCI Fast Ethernet 
DEC 21143 based adaptor" (DC21X4.SYS), so I do not even need a special
driver from Allnet. So it can't be _that_ exotic, right? :-)

I have attached the output of "tulip-diag -a -e -m" in case this helps
anyone to guess what the problem could be.

If someone wants more information (debug logs in certain configuration
or something like that) I would be very happy to provide it.

Thank you!

Bye,                 \|/
  Tobias             @ @
+----------------oOO-(_)-OOo-----------+
| Tobias Abt                           |
| email: tabt@gmx.de                   |
|   www: http://home.pages.de/~tabt/   |
+--------------------------------------+
--------------B7B67EAF597AB560E40E50CE
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii;
 name="tulip-diag.out"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline;
 filename="tulip-diag.out"

tulip-diag.c:v1.10 4/12/99 Donald Becker (becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov)
Index #1: Found a Digital DS21143 Tulip adapter at 0xb800.
Digital DS21143 Tulip chip registers at 0xb800:
  ffa08000 ffffffff ffffffff 00d9a010 00d9a210 f0000102 b3860000 f3fe0000
  e0000000 fff483ff ffffffff fffe0000 000000c6 ffff0001 fffbff7f 8ff20008
 Port selection is 100mbps-SYM/PCS 100baseTx scrambler, half-duplex.
 Transmit stopped, Receive stopped, half-duplex.
  The Rx process state is 'Stopped'.
  The Tx process state is 'Stopped'.
  The transmit threshold is 128.
Ethernet MAC Station Address 00:E0:7D:70:05:1E.
EEPROM transceiver/media description for the Digital DS21143 Tulip chip.
Leaf node at offset 40, default media type 0800 (Autosense).
 2 transceiver description blocks:
  Media MII, block type 3, length 23.
   MII interface PHY 0 (media type 11).
   21143 MII initialization sequence is 2 words: 0821 0001.
   21143 MII reset sequence is 3 words: 0821 0001 0001.
    Media capabilities are 7800, advertising 01e1.
    Full-duplex map 5000, Threshold map 1800.
    No MII interrupt.
   No MII transceivers found!
  Internal autonegotiation state is 'Autonegotiation disabled'.


--------------B7B67EAF597AB560E40E50CE--