tulip driver & Asante Fast 10/100 card

[Breen Mullins]

>Bob Farmer (ucs_brf@unx1.shsu.edu) reported:

 > The net cards we've been buying, Asante Fast 10/100, recently switched
>> > from 21140A chips to the PNIC chips. On startup, the driver reports the
>> > chip as a "Lite-On 82c168 PNIC rev 32". It works for a bit, but as soon
>> > as you try to transfer more than about 50K of data through the card, it
>> > locks, and the interface has to be taken down and brought back up again to
>> > restore connectivity.
>>

I've been looking at this problem with Bob and I see the same things
here.

>> What's the whole detection message?
>> Is the an MII transceiver, or does it use the internal encoder and an
>> external twister (SYM PHY)?
>
>The whole detection message is this (with 0.89H):
>
>tulip.c:v0.89H 5/23/98 becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov
>eth0: Lite-On 82c168 PNIC at 0xe400, 00 00 b4 94 e0 99, IRQ 10.
>eth0: MII transceiver found at MDIO address 1, config 3100 status 7829.
>eth0: Advertising 01e1 on PHY 1, previously advertising 01e1.
>eth0: Changing PNIC configuration to full-duplex, CSR6 812e0200.
>
>I am using Intel BX chipset Pentium II motherboards.
>
>If, while doing the receive-file test, I turn on "debug=3" on the module,
>I get this output when the interface hangs:
>
>eth0: Oversized Ethernet frame spanned multiple buffers, status 7fff0200!
>eth0: Oversized Ethernet frame spanned multiple buffers, status 08018192!

I get these messages, but the interface has not yet frozen when
I receive them -- my ftp transfers (about 30MB) always complete.

The first (and other odd-numbered) message always report status 7fff0200.
The even numbered messages are of the form 06xx8186 or occasionally
06xx8182.

>
>When using half-duplex those warnings above never appear.
>

>Now, retrying all of the above things with 0.91g, everything's the same
>except one thing: no crash or interface hang when I send a large file with
>FTP. Just a ton of the "Oversized Ethernet frame spanned multiple
>buffers" warnings (debug=3). Still the same interface hang when receiving
>a large file with FTP, though, at full-duplex.


After the transfer finishes if I either exit the ftp program or
wait a minute or two, I get these messages:

Too much work during an interrupt, csr5=0x026f0050.
Too much work during an interrupt, csr5=0x026d80d4.

at which point the interface must be brought down and restarted,
as Bob reports.

I also see another problem which worries me even more: the
address is being put on the wire incorrectly.

>eth0: Lite-On 82c168 PNIC at 0xe400, 00 00 b4 94 e0 99, IRQ 10.
That isn't an Asante address; it should be 000094 b499e0.

The byte-reversal happens only with the tulip driver; our MacOS
and Windows drivers pick up the address correctly. A generic
LiteOn card works correctly with the same tulip driver.

Here are the EEPROM contents of the two cards I'm using here:
LiteOn:
  00a0 cc2c 5734 f001 128a 00f1 0000 f19e
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
Asante:
  0000 94b4 6061 f001 128a 00f1 0000 8851
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000

Any help with these problems is much appreciated.


Breen Mullins

SQA Engineer
Asante Technologies, Inc.
800-662-9686x323
<bmullins@asante.com>