FW: Hamachi Support & Driver Development

[Ted Matsumura]

fyi -- I've asked Bernd of SuSE to join the list here

-----Original Message-----
From: Bernd Kaindl [mailto:bk@suse.de] 

Ted,

  Thank you for your attention, meanwhile I've a working link and as long as
I can say that my testing configuration is working now, so the major problem
which we had with the cards here looks to be cleared.

I've a back to back observation here. What me directed to think that there
is something happening with the autonegotiaton where the debug messages with
enabled debug mode in driver version 0.14. I was getting many repeated
messages about Autonegotiation.

I got this pair of messages every 10 seconds in debug mode:

Hamchi Autonegotiation status 00a4, LPA 48e0.
Autonegotiation regs 1000 00a4 0400 0000 08e0 48e0.

Later I've seen that these messages are looking to be timer based and the
driver function to print these messages is called every 10 seconds.

I think status reports like this can be provided in a much better way by
having the driver registering a directory in /proc and registering a virtual
file for status information there.
This way the user can read status information about the card anytime he
wants
in an much more helpful way as it is possible with syslogs of raw register
values.

Also providing the current values of the LED indicatiors on the card would
be nice to have for easy remote monitoring through a similar file in /proc.

Finally I think the problem I had was some problem on the PCI bus connected
with the PnP OS BIOS setting.

It looks like that the interrupt coalescing feature of the card is not 
enabled in the newest and best looking driver version 0.14.

Can you include the informatiion about the drivers Michael sent to me on
your page at http://www.packetengines.com/support/linnet.htm:
| 
|    Thank you for contacting us regarding your request to include the
Hamachi
| support in your next distribution of SuSE. The
| http://www.nscl.msu.edu/~kasten/perf/hamachi/src/ site has the following
| drivers:
| 
|  hamachi-0.08.tar.gz    26-Jan-99 15:20    15K  
|  hamachi-0.10.tar.gz    09-Feb-99 10:07    15K  
|  hamachi-0.11.tar.gz    22-Feb-99 10:24    16K  
|  hamachi-0.12.tar.gz    23-Feb-99 14:38    16K  
|  hamachi-0.13.tar.gz    25-Feb-99 18:02    16K  
|  hamachi-0.14.tar.gz    11-Mar-99 09:50    18K
I've found these drivers myself, but I only found them by first finding the
archive of the yellowfin-list and then reading the postings of march 99.

I'll test the cards in our Compaq AXP servers and also likely on the
SNI PRIMERGY 870 with 4*450Mhz PII-Xeon and 2 GB RAM
(http://www.siemens.com/servers/primergy/prim_us/pr870_us.htm)
we certify now for SNI.

After this I probably can say more about the driver.

I've tree questions when thinking about the primergy:

SNI states that is has two PCI busses, one 64bit 266MB/s bus and one
32bit 133MB/s bus. This should allow the use at least two Hamachi cards
in the machine. However, can you tell me if the driver supports multible
cards?

Another interesting item would be: The 870 has 4 hot-plug PCI compatible
Slots and just in case Linux would get support for PCI hot-plugging, would
the Card HW support it?

Finally a last question: Altogh I've seen a comment about SMP in the driver,
did you test the drivers with SMP? Rem.: the 870 is a 4-way machine and we
also have a SMP Alpha from Compaq here.

Bernhard Kaindl
Distribution Development

SuSE AG
Schanzaeckerstrasse 10
D-90443 Nuremberg

http://www.suse.com
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