New Netgear card (FA310tx 10/100)

[Mattias Sandgren]

Hello everyone!

I'm getting really tired of having problems with my ASIX 88140 based cards. The
problem is very similar to the problems people have experienced with the
Netgear FA310tx cards in that the ASIX doesn't see replies to ARP requests it
has sent. Easily solved by manually adding the ARP entries but there is
probably some kernel related problems too as I've experienced extreme delays of
packages sometimes, these delays have some peculiar things that characterize
them:

They occur during heavy network traffic between two of my computers using nfs
or ftp. The delay is the size of whole seconds + the normal delay for a high
speed network (milliseconds or less).
One downside is that I haven't been able to isolate the problem properly (no
packet loss or collisions) but I haven't experienced much problems with kernels
2.2.10 or newer and I encourage everyone that experience flaky timeouts to
upgrade their kernel. The only tulip driver that I rely on is 0.91e. The newer
0.91g won't work with the ASIX card.


A remedy to my problems could be buying some accesible Netgear FA310TX which
are based on a Lite-ON PNIC labeled "LC82C169C, 9916A, F3H26". As you can see,
the card is not based on the 82C168 which people have reported a lot of
problems with and they do not seem to be mentioned in the newest tulip driver
(0.91g). I have simple question for the subscribers of this list (and Donald): 

Will this card work with the tulip driver?

It might and I will try to test a card if possible. The machines these cards
will be in are mostly Pentiums with 430TX motherboards (Shuttle) and my
personal machine is a dual Celeron on a Microstar 6120 (440BX).

Help is appreciated!

--
.  Mattias Sandgren (sagge@acc.umu.se)
.. "Bass, the final frontier." -- Thomas Danley