Re: [9fans] Alpha success (w/ clock.c bugfix and ether2114x.c update)

[jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com]

On Tue Oct 23 10:36:25 EDT 2001, rminnich@lanl.gov wrote:
> ...
> Ah yes, the infamous "All the good people left DEC so we can't design
> ethernet cards anymore" problem with Alphas. We have a few hundred of
> these machines here. DEC never seems to have gotten auto-negotiation right
> in the last few years, and once you figure it out and fix it, it doesn't
> work anyway on the next little rev of the hardware. The problem always
> seems to boil down to very small timing problems such that the card comes
> up half and the switch full, or the switch half and card full, or both
> full, but the PHY is messed up so they can't talk anyway (the last time we
> fixed this). The usual way we fix it is to tell the switch to skip
> autonegotiation and wire the port to 100 Full. I mean, really, it's 2001,
> so 10 mbit half is unlikely anyway. Hardwiring switch ports works until it
> doesn't, and then you tweak the driver. Which will work until the next
> broken Alpha hardware comes in -- which won't be happening for long, so
> this will be less of a problem in future.
> ...

Yes, that's it. I had it working fine in my office on a Netgear switch (which
has no management, all the ports always autonegotiate) by telling the Alpha
firmware to bring it up at 10Mb; we could then load Plan 9 over the wire and
Plan 9 managed to negotiate to 100Mb OK. I obviously tried all this trickery
on the Procurve and I wrote the Plan 9 autonegotiate code while the DE-500 was
hooked up to a Procurve.

The galling thing was the attitude of the switch maintainers who "didn't change
a thing", clearly the card was at fault and could never have worked. When it
was pointed out that 2 systems which used to work before they "didn't do anything"
are no longer happy they just went off in the huff, leaving someone else to
tidy up their handywork. But we've all been there. Spleen vented.