From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: Brantley Coile Date: Sat, 16 Apr 2005 08:51:04 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Subject: [9fans] Intel 8254[17] and switches Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Topicbox-Message-UUID: 3ae7d8ae-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Final update on the etherigbe.c effort. The 82541 and 82547 have phy's that don't like inexpensive switches! After a couple of weeks banging my head on the wall, I discover that the PXE firmware on the things can't even drive 1GbE. I couldn't find any mention of this fact in anything from Intel, unless one of the erata's on a sheet I got states this fact in an obscure way. At first I noticed that at 100Mb I had to insert a delay after each frame. Otherwise it the frames that followed would disappear. Counts showed that they were transmitted, but snoopy didn't see anything. I shared my work in progress with several people, and they commented on the resends. This was because the stack would send 4 frames, drop three, get acked for the first, wait and send the first 3 over and another one. This would finally work, but was very slow. IL was less patient. I added a delay of 150=C2=B5s and they all get out. At 1 Gb things got really screwy. The phy would state that it had to use MDI-X, that is, it had to switch the cable to get a link. This obviously wasn't needed. The cables were good, and they were plugged into a switch. Phy showed that it was linked at Gb, light on switch concurred. The MAC registered also agreed, but no data. Nice activity lights but nothing that could be snoopyed or forward by the switch. Buggers! So, I would obviously discourage anyone from using these parts. Does anyone have a driver for the Broadcom BCM5721? Brantley