[vortex] 3c905C packet losses: SOLVED

[Donald Becker]

On Wed, 5 Jul 2000, Bogdan Costescu wrote:

> It was also instructive for us! We have learned that mii-diag sometimes
> fails, so I would still like to ask you to try 'mii-diag -p 24' and report
> the result.

Please try it with 99Q, or any recent 3c59x.c. I think you'll find that it
works properly.

As I said before, v99H wasn't designed for the newer 3Com chips and setup
programs.  The driver should now not use the transceiver setting in the
EEPROM directly.  Instead it's expected to know that there is no SYM
transceiver connection on the new chip.  When it sees the "100baseTx"
transceiver type it should set the transceiver type to
"Autonegotiation/MII", and then configure the MII management registers to
force the specified media type.

I believe what was happening was that the transceiver was being disabled
when the v99H driver set the chip to the invalid "100baseTx" transceiver
configuration.  The MII transceiver scan could not detect the disabled
transceiver.

Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Beowulf Clusters / Linux Installations
Annapolis MD 21403