Linux Ethernet-Howto
by Paul Gortmaker
v2.7, 5 May 1999
This is the Ethernet-Howto, which is a compilation of information
about which ethernet devices can be used for Linux, and how to set
them up. Note that this Howto is focused on the hardware and low
level driver aspect of the ethernet cards, and does not cover the
software end of things like ifconfig and route. See the Network Howto
for that stuff.
______________________________________________________________________
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1 New Versions of this Document
1.2 Using the Ethernet-Howto
1.3 HELP - It doesn't work!
2. What card should I buy for Linux?
2.1 So What Drivers are Stable?
2.2 Eight bit vs 16 bit Cards
2.3 32 Bit (VLB/EISA/PCI) Ethernet Cards
2.4 Available 100Mbs Cards and Drivers
2.5 100VG versus 100BaseT
2.6 Type of cable that your card should support
3. Frequently Asked Questions
3.1 Alpha Drivers -- Getting and Using them
3.2 Using More than one Ethernet Card per Machine
3.3 The
3.4 Problems with NE1000 / NE2000 cards (and clones)
3.5 Problems with SMC Ultra/EtherEZ and WD80*3 cards
3.6 Problems with 3Com cards
3.7 FAQs Not Specific to Any Card.
3.7.1 Linux and ISA Plug and Play Ethernet Cards
3.7.2 Ethercard is Not Detected at Boot.
3.7.3 (TT
3.7.4 PCI machine detects card but driver fails probe.
3.7.5 Shared Memory ISA cards in PCI Machine do not work (
3.7.6 Card seems to send data but never receives anything.
3.7.7 Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) Support
3.7.8 Gigabyte Ethernet Support
3.7.9 FDDI Support
3.7.10 Full Duplex Support
3.7.11 Ethernet Cards for Linux on SMP Machines
3.7.12 Ethernet Cards for Linux on Alpha/AXP PCI Boards
3.7.13 Ethernet for Linux on SUN/Sparc Hardware.
3.7.14 Ethernet for Linux on Other Hardware.
3.7.15 Linking 10 or 100 BaseT without a Hub
3.7.16 SIOCSIFxxx: No such device
3.7.17 SIOCSFFLAGS: Try again
3.7.18 Using `ifconfig' and Link UNSPEC with HW-addr of 00:00:00:00:00:00
3.7.19 Huge Number of RX and TX Errors
3.7.20 Entries in
3.7.21 Linux and ``trailers''
3.7.22 Access to the raw Ethernet Device
4. Performance Tips
4.1 General Concepts
4.2 ISA Cards and ISA Bus Speed
4.3 Setting the TCP Rx Window
4.4 Increasing NFS performance
5. Vendor/Manufacturer/Model Specific Information
5.1 3Com
5.1.1 3c501
5.1.2 EtherLink II, 3c503, 3c503/16
5.1.3 Etherlink Plus 3c505
5.1.4 Etherlink-16 3c507
5.1.5 Etherlink III, 3c509 / 3c509B
5.1.6 3c515
5.1.7 3c523
5.1.8 3c527
5.1.9 3c529
5.1.10 3c562
5.1.11 3c575
5.1.12 3c579
5.1.13 3c589 / 3c589B
5.1.14 3c590 / 3c595
5.1.15 3c592 / 3c597
5.1.16 3c900 / 3c905 / 3c905B
5.1.17 3c985
5.2 Accton
5.2.1 Accton MPX
5.2.2 Accton EN1203, EN1207, EtherDuo-PCI
5.2.3 Accton EN2209 Parallel Port Adaptor (EtherPocket)
5.2.4 Accton EN2212 PCMCIA Card
5.3 Allied Telesyn/Telesis
5.3.1 AT1500
5.3.2 AT1700
5.3.3 AT2450
5.3.4 AT2500
5.3.5 AT2540FX
5.4 AMD / Advanced Micro Devices
5.4.1 AMD LANCE (7990, 79C960/961/961A, PCnet-ISA)
5.4.2 AMD 79C965 (PCnet-32)
5.4.3 AMD 79C970/970A (PCnet-PCI)
5.4.4 AMD 79C971 (PCnet-FAST)
5.4.5 AMD 79C972 (PCnet-FAST+)
5.4.6 AMD 79C974 (PCnet-SCSI)
5.5 Ansel Communications
5.5.1 AC3200 EISA
5.6 Apricot
5.6.1 Apricot Xen-II On Board Ethernet
5.7 Arcnet
5.8 AT&T
5.8.1 AT&T T7231 (LanPACER+)
5.9 Boca Research
5.9.1 Boca BEN (ISA, VLB, PCI)
5.10 Cabletron
5.10.1 E10**, E10**-x, E20**, E20**-x
5.10.2 E2100
5.10.3 E22**
5.11 Cogent
5.11.1 EM100-ISA/EISA
5.11.2 Cogent eMASTER+, EM100-PCI, EM400, EM960, EM964
5.12 Compaq
5.12.1 Compaq Deskpro / Compaq XL (Embedded AMD Chip)
5.12.2 Compaq Nettelligent/NetFlex (Embedded ThunderLAN Chip)
5.13 Danpex
5.13.1 Danpex EN9400
5.14 D-Link
5.14.1 DE-100, DE-200, DE-220-T, DE-250
5.14.2 DE-520
5.14.3 DE-528
5.14.4 DE-530
5.14.5 DE-600
5.14.6 DE-620
5.14.7 DE-650
5.15 DFI
5.15.1 DFINET-300 and DFINET-400
5.16 Digital / DEC
5.16.1 DEPCA, DE100/1, DE200/1/2, DE210, DE422
5.16.2 Digital EtherWorks 3 (DE203, DE204, DE205)
5.16.3 DE425 EISA, DE434, DE435, DE500
5.16.4 DEC 21040, 21041, 2114x, Tulip
5.17 Farallon
5.17.1 Farallon Etherwave
5.18 Fujitsu
5.18.1 Fujitsu FMV-181/182/183/184
5.19 Hewlett Packard
5.19.1 27245A
5.19.2 HP EtherTwist, PC Lan+ (27247, 27252A)
5.19.3 HP-J2405A
5.19.4 HP-Vectra On Board Ethernet
5.19.5 HP 10/100 VG Any Lan Cards (27248B, J2573, J2577, J2585, J970, J973)
5.19.6 HP NetServer 10/100TX PCI (D5013A)
5.20 IBM / International Business Machines
5.20.1 IBM Thinkpad 300
5.20.2 IBM Credit Card Adaptor for Ethernet
5.20.3 IBM Token Ring
5.21 ICL Ethernet Cards
5.21.1 ICL EtherTeam 16i/32
5.22 Intel Ethernet Cards
5.22.1 Ether Express
5.22.2 Ether Express PRO/10
5.22.3 Ether Express PRO/10 PCI (EISA)
5.22.4 Ether Express PRO 10/100B
5.23 Kingston
5.24 LinkSys
5.24.1 LinkSys Etherfast 10/100 Cards.
5.24.2 LinkSys Pocket Ethernet Adapter Plus (PEAEPP)
5.24.3 LinkSys PCMCIA Adaptor
5.25 Microdyne
5.25.1 Microdyne Exos 205T
5.26 Mylex
5.26.1 Mylex LNE390A, LNE390B
5.26.2 Mylex LNP101
5.26.3 Mylex LNP104
5.27 Novell Ethernet, NExxxx and associated clones.
5.27.1 NE1000, NE2000
5.27.2 NE2000-PCI (RealTek/Winbond/Compex)
5.27.3 NE-10/100
5.27.4 NE1500, NE2100
5.27.5 NE/2 MCA
5.27.6 NE3200
5.27.7 NE3210
5.27.8 NE5500
5.28 Proteon
5.28.1 Proteon P1370-EA
5.28.2 Proteon P1670-EA
5.29 Pure Data
5.29.1 PDUC8028, PDI8023
5.30 Racal-Interlan
5.30.1 ES3210
5.30.2 NI5010
5.30.3 NI5210
5.30.4 NI6510 (not EB)
5.30.5 EtherBlaster (aka NI6510EB)
5.31 RealTek
5.31.1 RealTek RTL8002/8012 (AT-Lan-Tec) Pocket adaptor
5.31.2 RealTek 8009
5.31.3 RealTek 8019
5.31.4 RealTek 8029
5.31.5 RealTek 8129/8139
5.32 Sager
5.32.1 Sager NP943
5.33 Schneider & Koch
5.33.1 SK G16
5.34 SEEQ
5.34.1 SEEQ 8005
5.35 SMC (Standard Microsystems Corp.)
5.35.1 WD8003, SMC Elite
5.35.2 WD8013, SMC Elite16
5.35.3 SMC Elite Ultra
5.35.4 SMC Elite Ultra32 EISA
5.35.5 SMC EtherEZ (8416)
5.35.6 SMC EtherPower PCI (8432)
5.35.7 SMC EtherPower II PCI (9432)
5.35.8 SMC 3008
5.35.9 SMC 3016
5.35.10 SMC-9000 / SMC 91c92/4
5.35.11 SMC 91c100
5.36 Texas Instruments
5.36.1 ThunderLAN
5.37 Thomas Conrad
5.37.1 Thomas Conrad TC-5048
5.38 VIA
5.38.1 VIA 86C926 Amazon
5.38.2 VIA 86C100A Rhine II (and 3043 Rhine I)
5.39 Western Digital
5.40 Winbond
5.40.1 Winbond 89c840
5.40.2 Winbond 89c940
5.41 Xircom
5.41.1 Xircom PE1, PE2, PE3-10B*
5.41.2 Xircom PCMCIA Cards
5.42 Zenith
5.42.1 Z-Note
5.43 Znyx
5.43.1 Znyx ZX342 (DEC 21040 based)
5.44 Identifying an Unknown Card
5.44.1 Identifying the Network Interface Controller
5.44.2 Identifying the Ethernet Address
5.44.3 Tips on Trying to Use an Unknown Card
5.45 Drivers for Non-Ethernet Devices
6. Cables, Coax, Twisted Pair
6.1 Thin Ethernet (thinnet)
6.2 Twisted Pair
6.3 Thick Ethernet
7. Software Configuration and Card Diagnostics
7.1 Configuration Programs for Ethernet Cards
7.1.1 WD80x3 Cards
7.1.2 Digital / DEC Cards
7.1.3 NE2000+ or AT/LANTIC Cards
7.1.4 3Com Cards
7.2 Diagnostic Programs for Ethernet Cards
8. Technical Information
8.1 Programmed I/O vs. Shared Memory vs. DMA
8.1.1 Programmed I/O (e.g. NE2000, 3c509)
8.1.2 Shared memory (e.g. WD80x3, SMC-Ultra, 3c503)
8.1.3 Slave (normal) Direct Memory Access (e.g. none for Linux!)
8.1.4 Bus Master Direct Memory Access (e.g. LANCE, DEC 21040)
8.2 Writing a Driver
8.3 Driver interface to the kernel
8.3.1 Probe
8.3.2 Interrupt handler
8.3.3 Transmit function
8.3.4 Receive function
8.3.5 Open function
8.3.6 Close function (optional)
8.3.7 Miscellaneous functions
8.4 Technical information from 3Com
8.5 Notes on AMD PCnet / LANCE Based cards
8.6 Multicast and Promiscuous Mode
8.7 The Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF)
9. Networking with a Laptop/Notebook Computer
9.1 Using SLIP
9.2 PCMCIA Support
9.3 ISA Ethercard in the Docking Station.
9.4 Pocket / parallel port adaptors.
10. Miscellaneous.
10.1 Passing Ethernet Arguments to the Kernel
10.1.1 The
10.1.2 The
10.2 Using the Ethernet Drivers as Modules
10.3 Related Documentation
10.4 Disclaimer and Copyright
10.5 Closing
______________________________________________________________________
1. Introduction
The Ethernet-Howto covers what cards you should and shouldn't buy; how
to set them up, how to run more than one, and other common problems
and questions. It contains detailed information on the current level
of support for all of the most common ethernet cards available.
It does not cover the software end of things, as that is covered in
the NET-3 Howto. Also note that general non-Linux specific questions
about Ethernet are not (or at least they should not be) answered here.
For those types of questions, see the excellent amount of information
in the comp.dcom.lans.ethernet FAQ. You can FTP it from rtfm.mit.edu
just like all the other newsgroup FAQs.
This present revision covers distribution kernels up to and including
2.2.7.
The Ethernet-Howto is by:
Paul Gortmaker, p_gortmaker@yahoo.com
The primary source of information for the initial ASCII-only version
of the Ethernet-Howto was:
Donald J. Becker, becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov
who we should thank for writing the vast majority of ethernet card
drivers that are presently available for Linux. He also is the author
of the original NFS server too. Thanks Donald!
This document is Copyright (c) 1993-1999 by Paul Gortmaker. Please
see the Disclaimer and Copying information at the end of this document
(``copyright'') for information about redistribution of this document
and the usual `we are not responsible for what you manage to break...'
type legal stuff.
1.1. New Versions of this Document
New versions of this document can be retrieved from:
Ethernet-HOWTO <http://metalab.unc.edu/mdw/HOWTO/Ethernet-HOWTO.html>
or for those wishing to use FTP and/or get non-HTML formats:
Sunsite HOWTO Archive <ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/>
This is the `official' location - it can also be found on various
Linux WWW/ftp mirror sites. Updates will be made as new information
and/or drivers becomes available. If this copy that you are reading is
more than 6 months old, then you should check to see if an updated
copy is available.
This document is available in various formats (postscript, dvi, ASCII,
HTML, etc.). I would recommend viewing it in HTML (via a WWW browser)
or the Postscript/dvi format. Both of these contain cross-references
that are not included in the plain text ASCII format.
1.2. Using the Ethernet-Howto
As this guide is getting bigger and bigger, you probably don't want to
spend the rest of your afternoon reading the whole thing. And the good
news is that you don't have to read it all. The HTML and
Postscript/dvi versions have a table of contents which will really
help you find what you need a lot faster.
Chances are you are reading this document beacuse you can't get things
to work and you don't know what to do or check. The next section
(``HELP - It doesn't work!'') is aimed at newcomers to linux and will
point you in the right direction.
Typically the same problems and questions are asked over and over
again by different people. Chances are your specific problem or
question is one of these Frequently Asked Questions, and is answered
in the FAQ portion of this document . (``The FAQ section'').
Everybody should have a look through this section before posting for
help.
If you haven't got an ethernet card, then you will want to start with
deciding on a card. (``What card should I buy...'')
If you have already got an ethernet card, but are not sure if you can
use it with Linux, then you will want to read the section which
contains specific information on each manufacturer, and their cards.
(``Vendor Specific...'')
If you are interested in some of the technical aspects of the Linux
device drivers, then you can have a browse of the section with this
type of information. (``Technical Information'')
1.3. HELP - It doesn't work!
Okay, don't panic. This will lead you through the process of getting
things working, even if you have no prior background in linux or
ethernet hardware.
First thing you need to do is figure out what model your card is so
you can determine if Linux has a driver for that particular card.
Different cards typically have different ways of being controlled by
the host computer, and the linux driver (if there is one) contains
this control information in a format that allows linux to use the
card. If you don't have any manuals or anything of the sort that tell
you anything about the card model, then you can try the section on
helping with mystery cards (reference section: ``Identifying an
Unknown Card'').
Now that you know what type of card you have, read through the details
of your particular card in the card specific section (reference
section: ``Vendor Specific...'') which lists in alphabetical order,
card manufacturers, individual model numbers and whether it has a
linux driver or not. If it lists it as `Not Supported' you can pretty
much give up here. If you can't find your card in that list, then
check to see if your card manual lists it as being `compatible' with
another known card type. For example there are hundreds, if not
thousands of different cards made to be compatible with the original
Novell NE2000 design.
Assuming you have found out that a linux driver exists for your card,
you now have to find it and make use of it. Just because linux has a
driver for your card does not mean that it is built into every kernel.
(The kernel is the core operating system that is first loaded at boot,
and contains drivers for various pieces of hardware, among other
things.) Depending on who made the particular linux distribution you
are using, there may be only a few pre-built kernels, and a whole
bunch of drivers as smaller separate modules, or there may be a whole
lot of kernels, covering a vast combination of built-in driver
combinations.
Most linux distributions now ship with a bunch of small modules that
are the various drivers. The required modules are typically loaded
late in the boot process, or on-demand as a driver is needed to access
a particualr device. You will need to attach this module to the
kernel after it has booted up. See the information that came with your
distribution on installing and using modules, along with the module
section in this document. (``Using the Ethernet Drivers as Modules'')
If you didn't find either a pre-built kernel with your driver, or a
module form of the driver, chances are you have a typically uncommon
card, and you will have to build your own kernel with that driver
included. Once you have linux installed, building a custom kernel is
not difficult at all. You essentially answer yes or no to what you
want the kernel to contain, and then tell it to build it. There is a
Kernel-HowTo that will help you along.
At this point you should have somehow managed to be booting a kernel
with your driver built in, or be loading it as a module. About half
of the problems people have are related to not having driver loaded
one way or another, so you may find things work now.
If it still doesn't work, then you need to verify that the kernel is
indeed detecting the card. To do this, you need to type dmesg | more
when logged in after the system has booted and all modules have been
loaded. This will allow you to review the boot messages that the
kernel scrolled up the screen during the boot process. If the card
has been detected, you should see somewhere in that list a message
from your card's driver that starts with eth0, mentions the driver
name and the hardware parameters (interrupt setting, input/output port
address, etc) that the card is set for. (Note: At boot, linux lists
all the PCI cards installed in the system, regardless of what drivers
are available - do not mistake this for the driver detection which
comes later!)
If you don't see a driver indentification message like this, then the
driver didn't detect your card, and that is why things aren't working.
See the FAQ (``The FAQ Section'') for what to do if your card is not
detected. If you have a NE2000 compatible, there is also some NE2000
specific tips on getting a card detected in the FAQ section as well.
If the card is detected, but the detection message reports some sort
of error, like a resource conflict, then the driver probably won't
have initialized properly and the card still wont be useable. Most
common error messages of this sort are also listed in the FAQ section,
along with a solution.
If the detection message seems okay, then double check the card
resources reported by the driver against those that the card is
physically set for (either by little black jumpers on the card, or by
a software utility supplied by the card manufacturer.) These must
match exactly. For example, if you have the card jumpered or
configured to IRQ 15 and the driver reports IRQ 10 in the boot
messages, things will not work. The FAQ section discusses the most
common cases of drivers incorrectly detecting the configuration
information of various cards.
At this point, you have managed to get you card detected with all the
correct parameters, and hopefully everything is working. If not, then
you either have a software configuration error, or a hardware
configuration error. A software configuration error is not setting up
the right network addresses for the ifconfig and route commands, and
details of how to do that are fully described in the Network HowTo and
the `Network Administrator's Guide' which both probably came on the
CD-ROM you installed from.
A hardware configuration error is when some sort of resource conflict
or mis-configuration (that the driver didn't detect at boot) stops the
card from working properly. This typically can be observed in several
different ways. (1) You get an error message when ifconfig tries to
open the device for use, such as ``SIOCSFFLAGS: Try again''. (2) The
driver reports eth0 error messages (viewed by dmesg | more) or strange
inconsistencies for each time it tries to send or receive data. (3)
Typing cat /proc/net/dev shows non-zero numbers in one of the errs,
drop, fifo, frame or carrier columns for eth0. (4) Typing cat
/proc/interrupts shows a zero interrupt count for the card. Most of
the typical hardware configuration errors are also discussed in the
FAQ section.
Well, if you have got to this point and things still aren't working,
read the FAQ section of this document, read the vendor specific
section detailing your particular card, and if it still doesn't work
then you may have to resort to posting to an appropriate newsgroup for
help. If you do post, please detail all relevant information in that
post, such as the card brand, the kernel version, the driver boot
messages, the output from cat /proc/net/dev, a clear description of
the problem, and of course what you have already tried to do in an
effort to get things to work.
You would be surprised at how many people post useless things like
``Can someone help me? My ethernet doesn't work.'' and nothing else.
Readers of the newsgroups tend to ignore such silly posts, whereas a
detailed and informational problem description may allow a `linux-
guru' to spot your problem right away.
2. What card should I buy for Linux?
The answer to this question depends heavily on exactly what you intend
on doing with your net connection, and how much traffic it will see.
If you only expect a single user to be doing the occasional ftp
session or WWW connection, then even an old 8 bit ISA card will
probably keep you happy.
If you intend to set up a server, and you require the CPU overhead of
Rx'ing and Tx'ing network data to be kept to a minimum, you probably
want to look at one of the PCI cards that uses a chip with bus-
mastering capapbility, such as the DEC tulip (21xxx) chip, or the AMD
PCnet-PCI chip.
If you fall somewhere in the middle of the above, then any one of the
low cost PCI or 16 bit ISA cards with stable drivers will do the job
for you.
2.1. So What Drivers are Stable?
Of the 16 bit ISA cards, the following drivers are very mature, and
you shouldn't have any problems if you buy a card that uses these
drivers.
SMC-Ultra/EtherEZ, SMC-Elite (WD80x3), 3c509, Lance, NE2000.
This is not to say that all the other drivers are unstable. It just
happens that the above are the oldest and most used of all the linux
drivers, making them the safest choice.
Note that some el-cheapo motherboards can have trouble with the bus-
mastering that the ISA Lance cards do, and some el-cheapo NE2000
clones can have trouble getting detected at boot.
The most commonly used linux PCI drivers are probably the 3Com
Vortex/Boomerang (3c59x/3c9xx), the DEC tulip (21xxx), and the Intel
EtherExpressPro 100. The various PCI-NE2000 clone cards are also
extremely common, but purchasing a PCI-NE2000 clone card is not
recommended unless the lowest possible price is more important than
having a modern high-performace design card.
2.2. Eight bit vs 16 bit Cards
You probably can't buy a new 8 bit ISA ethercard anymore, but you will
find lots of them turning up at computer swap meets and the like for
the next few years, at very low prices. This will make them popular
for ``home-ethernet'' systems. The above holds true for 16 bit ISA
cards now as well, since PCI cards are now very common.
Some 8 bit cards that will provide adequate performance for light to
average use are the wd8003, the 3c503 and the ne1000. The 3c501
provides poor performance, and these poor 12 year old relics of the XT
days should be avoided. (Send them to Alan, he collects them...)
The 8 bit data path doesn't hurt performance that much, as you can
still expect to get about 500 to 800kB/s ftp download speed to an 8
bit wd8003 card (on a fast ISA bus) from a fast host. And if most of
your net-traffic is going to remote sites, then the bottleneck in the
path will be elsewhere, and the only speed difference you will notice
is during net activity on your local subnet.
2.3. 32 Bit (VLB/EISA/PCI) Ethernet Cards
Note that a 10Mbs network typically doesn't justify requiring a 32
bit interface. See ``Programmed I/O vs. ...'' as to why having a
10Mbps ethercard on an 8MHz ISA bus is really not a bottleneck. Even
though having the ethercard on a fast bus won't necessarily mean
faster transfers, it will usually mean reduced CPU overhead, which is
good for multi-user systems.
Of course for 100Mbps networks, which are now commonplace, the 32 bit
interface is a must to make use of the full bandwidth. AMD has the 32
bit PCnet-VLB and PCnet-PCI chips. See ``AMD PCnet-32'' for info on
the 32 bit versions of the LANCE / PCnet-ISA chip.
The DEC 21xxx PCI `tulip' chip is another option (see ``DEC 21040'')
for power-users. Many manufacturers produce cards that use this chip,
and the prices of such no-name cards is usually quite cheap.
3Com's `Vortex' and `Boomerang' PCI cards are also another option, and
the price is quite cheap if you can get one under their evaluation
deal while it lasts. (see ``3c590/3c595'')
Intel's EtherExpress Pro 10/100 PCI cards have also been reported to
work well with linux. (see ``EtherExpress'')
Various clone manufacturers have started making PCI NE2000 clones
based on a RealTek or Winbond chip. These cards are also supported by
the linux ne2000 driver for v2.0.31 and newer kernels. However you
only benefit from the faster bus interface, as the card is still using
the age-old ne2000 driver interface. As of v2.0.34 (and above) a
separate PCI-specific driver for these cards ne2k-pci.c is also
available, which will be sightly more efficient than the ISA ne.c
driver.
2.4. Available 100Mbs Cards and Drivers
The present list of supported 100Mbs hardware is as follows: cards
with the DEC 21140 chip; the 3c595/3c90x Vortex cards; the
EtherExpressPro10/100B; the PCnet-FAST; the SMC 83c170 (epic100) and
the HP 100VG ANY-LAN.
Have a look at the vendor specific information for each that is in
this document. You may also want to check out some of the following:
Linux and 100Mbs Ethernet
<http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/misc/100mbs.html>
Donald's 100VG Page
<http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/100vg.html>
Dan Kegel's Fast Ethernet Page <http://alumni.caltech.edu/~dank/fe/>
2.5. 100VG versus 100BaseT
100BaseT is much more prominent than 100VG, and the following blurb
from an older one of Donald's informative comp.os.linux postings
summarizes the situation quite well:
``For those not in the know, there are two competing 100Mbs ethernet
standards, 100VG (aka 100baseVG and 100VG-AnyLAN) and 100baseT (with
100baseTx, 100baseT4 and 100baseFx cable types).
100VG was on the market first, and I feel that it is better engineered
than 100baseTx. I was rooting for it to win, but it clearly isn't
going to. HP et al. made several bad choices:
1) Delaying the standard so that they could accommodate IBM and
support token ring frames. It `seemed like a good idea at the time',
since it would enable token ring shops to upgrade without the managers
having to admit they made a very expensive mistake committing to the
wrong technology. But there was nothing to be gained, as the two
frame types couldn't coexist on a network, token ring is a morass of
complexity, and IBM went with 100baseT anyway.
2) Producing only ISA and EISA cards. (A PCI model was only recently
announced.) The ISA bus is too slow for 100mbs, and relatively few
EISA machines exist. At the time VLB was common, fast, and cheap with
PCI a viable choice. But "old-timer" wisdom held that servers would
stay with the more expensive EISA bus.
3) Not sending me a databook. Yes, this action was the real reason
for the 100VGs downfall :-). I called all over for programming info,
and all I could get was a few page color glossy brochure from AT&T
describing how wonderful the Regatta chipset was.''
2.6. Type of cable that your card should support
If you are setting up a small ``personal'' network, you will probably
want to use thinnet or thin ethernet cable. This is the style with the
standard BNC connectors. The thinnet, or thin ethernet cabling,
(RG-58 coaxial cable) with the BNC (metal push and turn-to-lock)
connectors is technically called 10Base2.
Most ethercards also come in a `Combo' version for only $10-$20 more.
These have both twisted pair and thinnet transceiver built-in,
allowing you to change your mind later.
The twisted pair cables, with the RJ-45 (giant phone jack) connectors
is technically called 10BaseT. You may also hear it called UTP
(Unsheilded Twisted Pair).
The older thick ethernet (10mm coaxial cable) which is only found in
older installations is called 10Base5. The 15 pin D-shaped plug found
on some ethernet cards (the AUI connector) is used to connect to thick
ethernet and external transcievers.
Large corporate installations will most likely use 10BaseT instead of
10Base2. 10Base2 does not offer any upgrade path to 100Base-whatever.
See ``Cables, Coax...'' for other concerns with different types of
ethernet cable.
3. Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some of the more frequently asked questions about using Linux
with an Ethernet connection. Some of the more specific questions are
sorted on a `per manufacturer basis'. Chances are the question you
want an answer for has already been asked (and answered!) by someone
else, so even if you don't find your answer here, you probably can
find what you want from a news archive such as Dejanews
<http://www.dejanews.com>.
3.1. Alpha Drivers -- Getting and Using them
I heard that there is an updated or preliminary/alpha driver available
for my card. Where can I get it?
The newest of the `new' drivers can be found on Donald's ftp site:
cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov in the /pub/linux/ area. Things change here quite
frequently, so just look around for it. Alternatively, it may be
easier to use a WWW browser on:
Don's Linux Home Page <http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/>
to locate the driver that you are looking for. (Watch out for WWW
browsers that silently munge the source by replacing TABs with spaces
and so on - use ftp, or at least an FTP URL for downloading if
unsure.)
Now, if it really is an alpha, or pre-alpha driver, then please treat
it as such. In other words, don't complain because you can't figure
out what to do with it. If you can't figure out how to install it,
then you probably shouldn't be testing it. Also, if it brings your
machine down, don't complain. Instead, send us a well documented bug
report, or even better, a patch!
Note that some of the `useable' experimental/alpha drivers have been
included in the standard kernel source tree. When running make config
one of the first things you will be asked is whether to ``Prompt for
development and/or incomplete code/drivers''. You will have to answer
`Y' here to get asked about including any alpha/experiemntal drivers.
3.2. Using More than one Ethernet Card per Machine
What needs to be done so that Linux can run two ethernet cards?
The answer to this question depends on whether the driver(s) is/are
being used as a loadable module or are compiled directly into the
kernel. Most linux distributions use modular drivers now. This saves
distributing lots of kernels, each with a different driver set built
in. Instead a single basic kernel is used and the individual drivers
that are need for a particular user's system are loaded once the
system has booted far enough to access the driver module files
(usually stored in /lib/modules/).
With the Driver as a Module: In the case of PCI drivers, the module
will typically detect all of the installed cards of that brand model
automatically. However, for ISA cards, probing for a card is not a
safe operation, and hence you typically need to supply the I/O base
address of the card so the module knows where to look. This
information is stored in the file /etc/conf.modules.
As an example, consider a user that has two ISA NE2000 cards, one at
0x300 and one at 0x240 and what lines they would have in their
/etc/conf.modules file:
alias eth0 ne
alias eth1 ne
options ne io=0x240,0x300
What this does: This says that if the administrator (or the kernel)
does a modprobe eth0 or a modprobe eth1 then the ne.o driver should be
loaded for either eth0 or eth1. Furthermore, when the ne.o module is
loaded, it should be loaded with the options io=0x240,0x300 so that
the driver knows where to look for the cards. Note that the 0x is
important - things like 300h as commonly used in the DOS world won't
work. Switching the order of the 0x240 and the 0x300 will switch
which physical card ends up as eth0 and eth1.
Most of the ISA module drivers can take multiple comma separated I/O
values like this example to handle multiple cards. However, some
(older?) drivers, such as the 3c501.o module are currently only able
to handle one card per module load. In this case you can load the
module twice to get both cards detected. The /etc/conf.modules file in
this case would look like:
alias eth0 3c501
alias eth1 3c501
options eth0 -o 3c501-0 io=0x280 irq=5
options eth1 -o 3c501-1 io=0x300 irq=7
In this example the -o option has been used to give each instance of
the module a unique name, since you can't have two modules loaded with
the same name. The irq= option has also been used to to specify the
hardware IRQ setting of the card. (This method can also be used with
modules that accept comma separated I/O values, but it is less
efficient since the module ends up being loaded twice when it doesn't
really need to be.)
As a final example, consider a user with one 3c503 card at 0x350and
one SMC Elite16 (wd8013) card at 0x280. They would have:
alias eth0 wd
alias eth1 3c503
options wd io=0x280
options 3c503 io=0x350
For PCI cards, you typically only need the alias lines to correlate
the ethN interfaces with the appropriate driver name, since the I/O
base of a PCI card can be safely detected.
The available modules are typically stored in /lib/modules/`uname
-r`/net where the uname -r command gives the kernel version (e.g.
2.0.34). You can look in there to see which one matches your card.
Once you have the correct settings in your conf.modules file, you can
test things out with:
modprobe ethN
dmesg | tail
where `N' is the number of the ethernet interface you are testing.
With the Driver Compiled into the Kernel: If you have the driver
compiled into the kernel, then the hooks for multiple ethercards are
all there. However, note that at the moment only one ethercard is
auto-probed for by default. This helps to avoid possible boot time
hangs caused by probing sensitive cards.
(Note: As of late 2.1.x kernels, the boot probes have been sorted into
safe and unsafe, so that all safe (e.g. PCI and EISA) probes will find
all related cards automatically. Systems with more than one ethernet
card with at least one of them being an ISA card will still need to do
one of the following.)
There are two ways that you can enable auto-probing for the second
(and third, and...) card. The easiest method is to pass boot-time
arguments to the kernel, which is usually done by LILO. Probing for
the second card can be achieved by using a boot-time argument as
simple as ether=0,0,eth1. In this case eth0 and eth1 will be assigned
in the order that the cards are found at boot. Say if you want the
card at 0x300 to be eth0 and the card at 0x280 to be eth1 then you
could use
LILO: linux ether=5,0x300,eth0 ether=15,0x280,eth1
The ether= command accepts more than the IRQ + I/O + name shown above.
Please have a look at ``Passing Ethernet Arguments...'' for the full
syntax, card specific parameters, and LILO tips.
These boot time arguments can be made permanent so that you don't have
to re-enter them every time. See the LILO configuration option
`append' in the LILO manual.
The second way (not recommended) is to edit the file Space.c and
replace the 0xffe0 entry for the I/O address with a zero. The 0xffe0
entry tells it not to probe for that device -- replacing it with a
zero will enable autoprobing for that device.
Note that if you are intending to use Linux as a gateway between two
networks, you will have to re-compile a kernel with IP forwarding
enabled. Usually using an old AT/286 with something like the `kbridge'
software is a better solution.
If you are viewing this while net-surfing, you may wish to look at a
mini-howto Donald has on his WWW site. Check out Multiple Ethercards
<http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/misc/multicard.html>.
3.3. The ether= thing didn't do anything for me. Why?
As described above, the ether= command only works for drivers that are
compiled into the kernel. Now most distributions use the drivers in a
modular form, and so the ether= command is rarely used anymore. (Some
older documentation has yet to be updated to reflect this change.) If
you want to apply options for a modular ethernet driver you must make
changes to the /etc/conf.modules file.
If you are using a compiled in driver, and have added an ether= to
your LILO configuration file, note that it won't take effect until you
re-run lilo to process the updated configuration file.
3.4. Problems with NE1000 / NE2000 cards (and clones)
Problem: PCI NE2000 clone card is not detected at boot with v2.0.x.
Reason: The ne.c driver up to v2.0.30 only knows about the PCI ID
number of RealTek 8029 based clone cards. Since then, several others
have also released PCI NE2000 clone cards, with different PCI ID
numbers, and hence the driver doesn't detect them.
Solution: The easiest solution is to upgrade to a v2.0.31 (or newer)
version of the linux kernel. It knows the ID numbers of about five
different NE2000-PCI chips, and will detect them automatically at boot
or at module loading time. If you upgrade to 2.0.34 (or newer) there
is a PCI-only specific NE2000 driver that is slightly smaller and more
efficient than the original ISA/PCI driver.
Problem: PCI NE2000 clone card is reported as an ne1000 (8 bit card!)
at boot or when I load the ne.o module for v2.0.x, and hence doesn't
work.
Reason: Some PCI clones don't implement byte wide access (and hence
are not truly 100% NE2000 compatible). This causes the probe to think
they are NE1000 cards.
Solution: You need to upgrade to v2.0.31 (or newer) as described
above. The driver(s) now check for this hardware bug.
Problem: PCI NE2000 card gets terrible performance, even when reducing
the window size as described in the Performance Tips section.
Reason: The spec sheets for the original 8390 chip, desgined and sold
over ten years ago, noted that a dummy read from the chip was required
before each write operation for maximum reliablity. The driver has
the facility to do this but it has been disabled by default since the
v1.2 kernel days. One user has reported that re-enabling this `mis-
feature' helped their performance with a cheap PCI NE2000 clone card.
Solution: Since it has only been reported as a solution by one person,
don't get your hopes up. Re-enabling the read before write fix is done
by simply editing the driver file in linux/drivers/net/, uncommenting
the line containing NE_RW_BUGFIX and then rebuilding the kernel or
module as appropriate. Please send an e-mail describing the
performance difference and type of card/chip you have if this helps
you. (The same can be done for the ne2k-pci.c driver as well).
Problem: The ne2k-pci.c driver reports error messages like timeout
waiting for Tx RDC with a PCI NE2000 card and doesn't work right.
Reason: Your card and/or the card to PCI bus link can't handle the
long word I/O optimization used in this driver.
Solution: Firstly, check the settings available in the BIOS/CMOS setup
to see if any related to PCI bus timing are too aggressive for
reliable operation. Otherwise using the ISA/PCI ne.c driver (or
removing the #define USE_LONGIO from ne2k-pci.c) should let you use
the card.
Probem: ISA Plug and Play NE2000 (such as RealTek 8019) is not
detected.
Reason: The original NE2000 specification (and hence the linux NE2000
driver) does not have support for Plug and Play.
Solution: Use the DOS configuration disk that came with the card to
disable PnP, and to set the card to a specified I/O address and IRQ.
Add a line to /etc/conf.modules like options ne io=0xNNN where 0xNNN
is the hex I/O address you set the card to. (This assumes you are
using a modular driver; if not then use an ether=0,0xNNN,eth0 argument
at boot). You may also have to enter the BIOS/CMOS setup and mark the
IRQ as Legacy-ISA instead of PnP. Alternatively, if you need to leave
PnP enabled for compatibility with some other operating system, then
look into the isapnptools package. Try man isapnp to see if it is
already installed on your system. If not, then have a look at the
following URL:
ISA PNP Tools <http://www.roestock.demon.co.uk/isapnptools/>
Problem: NE*000 driver reports `not found (no reset ack)' during boot
probe.
Reason: This is related to the above change. After the initial
verification that an 8390 is at the probed I/O address, the reset is
performed. When the card has completed the reset, it is supposed to
acknowedge that the reset has completed. Your card doesn't, and so
the driver assumes that no NE card is present.
Solution: You can tell the driver that you have a bad card by using an
otherwise unused mem_end hexidecimal value of 0xbad at boot time. You
have to also supply a non-zero I/O base for the card when using the
0xbad override. For example, a card that is at 0x340 that doesn't ack
the reset would use something like:
LILO: linux ether=0,0x340,0,0xbad,eth0
This will allow the card detection to continue, even if your card
doesn't ACK the reset. If you are using the driver as a module, then
you can supply the option bad=0xbad just like you supply the I/O
address.
Problem: NE*000 card hangs machine at first network access.
Reason: This problem has been reported for kernels as old as 1.1.57 to
the present. It appears confined to a few software configurable clone
cards. It appears that they expect to be initialized in some special
way.
Solution: Several people have reported that running the supplied DOS
software config program and/or the supplied DOS driver prior to warm
booting (i.e. loadlin or the `three-finger-salute') into linux allowed
the card to work. This would indicate that these cards need to be
initialized in a particular fashion, slightly different than what the
present Linux driver does.
Problem: NE*000 ethercard at 0x360 doesn't get detected.
Reason: Your NE2000 card is 0x20 wide in I/O space, which makes it hit
the parallel port at 0x378. Other devices that could be there are the
second floppy controller (if equipped) at 0x370 and the secondary IDE
controller at 0x376--0x377. If the port(s) are already registered by
another driver, the kernel will not let the probe happen.
Solution: Either move your card to an address like 0x280, 0x340, 0x320
or compile without parallel printer support.
Problem: Network `goes away' every time I print something (NE2000)
Reason: Same problem as above, but you have an older kernel that
doesn't check for overlapping I/O regions. Use the same fix as above,
and get a new kernel while you are at it.
Problem: NE*000 ethercard probe at 0xNNN: 00 00 C5 ... not found.
(invalid signature yy zz)
Reason: First off, do you have a NE1000 or NE2000 card at the addr.
0xNNN? And if so, does the hardware address reported look like a
valid one? If so, then you have a poor NE*000 clone. All NE*000 clones
are supposed to have the value 0x57 in bytes 14 and 15 of the SA PROM
on the card. Yours doesn't -- it has `yy zz' instead.
Solution: There are two ways to get around this. The easiest is to use
an 0xbad mem_end value as described above for the `no reset ack'
problem. This will bypass the signature check, as long as a non-zero
I/O base is also given. This way no recompilation of the kernel is
required.
The second method (for hackers) involves changing the driver itself,
and then recompiling your kernel (or module). The driver
(/usr/src/linux/drivers/net/ne.c) has a "Hall of Shame" list at about
line 42. This list is used to detect poor clones. For example, the
DFI cards use `DFI' in the first 3 bytes of the PROM, instead of using
0x57 in bytes 14 and 15, like they are supposed to.
Problem: The machine hangs during boot right after the `8390...' or
`WD....' message. Removing the NE2000 fixes the problem.
Solution: Change your NE2000 base address to something like 0x340.
Alternatively, you can use the ``reserve='' boot argument in
conjunction with the ``ether='' argument to protect the card from
other device driver probes.
Reason: Your NE2000 clone isn't a good enough clone. An active NE2000
is a bottomless pit that will trap any driver autoprobing in its
space. Changing the NE2000 to a less-popular address will move it out
of the way of other autoprobes, allowing your machine to boot.
Problem: The machine hangs during the SCSI probe at boot.
Reason: It's the same problem as above, change the ethercard's
address, or use the reserve/ether boot arguments.
Problem: The machine hangs during the soundcard probe at boot.
Reason: No, that's really during the silent SCSI probe, and it's the
same problem as above.
Problem: NE2000 not detected at boot - no boot messages at all
Solution: There is no `magic solution' as there can be a number of
reasons why it wasn't detected. The following list should help you
walk through the possible problems.
1) Build a new kernel with only the device drivers that you need.
Verify that you are indeed booting the fresh kernel. Forgetting to run
lilo, etc. can result in booting the old one. (Look closely at the
build time/date reported at boot.) Sounds obvious, but we have all
done it before. Make sure the driver is in fact included in the new
kernel, by checking the System.map file for names like ne_probe.
2) Look at the boot messages carefully. Does it ever even mention
doing a ne2k probe such as `NE*000 probe at 0xNNN: not found (blah
blah)' or does it just fail silently. There is a big difference. Use
dmesg|more to review the boot messages after logging in, or hit Shift-
PgUp to scroll the screen up after the boot has completed and the
login prompt appears.
3) After booting, do a cat /proc/ioports and verify that the full
iospace that the card will require is vacant. If you are at 0x300 then
the ne2k driver will ask for 0x300-0x31f. If any other device driver
has registered even one port anywhere in that range, the probe will
not take place at that address and will silently continue to the next
of the probed addresses. A common case is having the lp driver reserve
0x378 or the second IDE channel reserve 0x376 which stops the ne
driver from probing 0x360-0x380.
4) Same as above for cat /proc/interrupts. Make sure no other device
has registered the interrupt that you set the ethercard for. In this
case, the probe will happen, and the ether driver will complain loudly
at boot about not being able to get the desired IRQ line.
5) If you are still stumped by the silent failure of the driver, then
edit it and add some printk() to the probe. For example, with the ne2k
you could add/remove lines (marked with a `+' or `-') in
linux/drivers/net/ne.c like:
______________________________________________________________________
int reg0 = inb_p(ioaddr);
+ printk("NE2k probe - now checking %x\n",ioaddr);
- if (reg0 == 0xFF)
+ if (reg0 == 0xFF) {
+ printk("NE2k probe - got 0xFF (vacant I/O port)\n");
return ENODEV;
+ }
______________________________________________________________________
Then it will output messages for each port address that it checks, and
you will see if your card's address is being probed or not.
6) You can also get the ne2k diagnostic from Don's ftp site (mentioned
in the howto as well) and see if it is able to detect your card after
you have booted into linux. Use the `-p 0xNNN' option to tell it where
to look for the card. (The default is 0x300 and it doesn't go looking
elsewhere, unlike the boot-time probe.) The output from when it finds
a card will look something like:
______________________________________________________________________
Checking the ethercard at 0x300.
Register 0x0d (0x30d) is 00
Passed initial NE2000 probe, value 00.
8390 registers: 0a 00 00 00 63 00 00 00 01 00 30 01 00 00 00 00
SA PROM 0: 00 00 00 00 c0 c0 b0 b0 05 05 65 65 05 05 20 20
SA PROM 0x10: 00 00 07 07 0d 0d 01 01 14 14 02 02 57 57 57 57
NE2000 found at 0x300, using start page 0x40 and end page 0x80.
______________________________________________________________________
Your register values and PROM values will probably be different. Note
that all the PROM values are doubled for a 16 bit card, and that the
ethernet address (00:00:c0:b0:05:65) appears in the first row, and the
double 0x57 signature appears at the end of the PROM.
The output from when there is no card installed at 0x300 will look
something like this:
______________________________________________________________________
Checking the ethercard at 0x300.
Register 0x0d (0x30d) is ff
Failed initial NE2000 probe, value ff.
8390 registers: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
SA PROM 0: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
SA PROM 0x10: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
Invalid signature found, wordlength 2.
______________________________________________________________________
The 0xff values arise because that is the value that is returned when
one reads a vacant I/O port. If you happen to have some other hardware
in the region that is probed, you may see some non 0xff values as
well.
7) Try warm booting into linux from a DOS boot floppy (via loadlin)
after running the supplied DOS driver or config program. It may be
doing some extra (i.e. non-standard) "magic" to initialize the card.
8) Try Russ Nelson's ne2000.com packet driver to see if even it can
see your card -- if not, then things do not look good. Example:
A:> ne2000 0x60 10 0x300
The arguments are software interrupt vector, hardware IRQ, and I/O
base. You can get it from any msdos archive in pktdrv11.zip -- The
current version may be newer than 11.
3.5. Problems with SMC Ultra/EtherEZ and WD80*3 cards
Problem: You get messages such as the following:
eth0: bogus packet size: 65531, status=0xff, nxpg=0xff
Reason: There is a shared memory problem.
Solution: The most common reason for this is PCI machines that are not
configured to map in ISA memory devices. Hence you end up reading the
PC's RAM (all 0xff values) instead of the RAM on the card that
contains the data from the received packet.
Other typical problems that are easy to fix are board conflicts,
having cache or `shadow ROM' enabled for that region, or running your
ISA bus faster than 8Mhz. There are also a surprising number of memory
failures on ethernet cards, so run a diagnostic program if you have
one for your ethercard.
Problem: SMC EtherEZ doesn't work in non-shared memory (PIO) mode.
Reason: Older versions of the Ultra driver only supported the card in
the shared memory mode of operation.
Solution: The driver in kernel version 2.0 and above also supports the
programmed I/O mode of operation. Upgrade to v2.0 or newer.
Problem: Old wd8003 and/or jumper-settable wd8013 always get the IRQ
wrong.
Reason: The old wd8003 cards and jumper-settable wd8013 clones don't
have the EEPROM that the driver can read the IRQ setting from. If the
driver can't read the IRQ, then it tries to auto-IRQ to find out what
it is. And if auto-IRQ returns zero, then the driver just assigns IRQ
5 for an 8 bit card or IRQ 10 for a 16 bit card.
Solution: Avoid the auto-IRQ code, and tell the kernel what the IRQ
that you have jumpered the card to in your module configuration file
(or via a boot time argument for in-kernel drivers).
Problem: SMC Ultra card is detected as wd8013, but the IRQ and shared
memory base is wrong.
Reason: The Ultra card looks a lot like a wd8013, and if the Ultra
driver is not present in the kernel, the wd driver may mistake the
ultra as a wd8013. The ultra probe comes before the wd probe, so this
usually shouldn't happen. The ultra stores the IRQ and mem base in the
EEPROM differently than a wd8013, hence the bogus values reported.
Solution: Recompile with only the drivers you need in the kernel. If
you have a mix of wd and ultra cards in one machine, and are using
modules, then load the ultra module first.
3.6. Problems with 3Com cards
Problem: The 3c503 picks IRQ N, but this is needed for some other
device which needs IRQ N. (eg. CD ROM driver, modem, etc.) Can this
be fixed without compiling this into the kernel?
Solution: The 3c503 driver probes for a free IRQ line in the order {5,
9/2, 3, 4}, and it should pick a line which isn't being used. The
driver chooses when the card is ifconfig'ed into operation.
If you are using a modular driver, you can use module parameters to
set various things, including the IRQ value.
The following selects IRQ9, base location 0x300, <ignored value>, and
if_port #1 (the external transceiver).
io=0x300 irq=9 xcvr=1
Alternately, if the driver is compiled into the kernel, you can set
the same values at boot by passing parameters via LILO.
LILO: linux ether=9,0x300,0,1,eth0
The following selects IRQ3, probes for the base location, <ignored
value>, and the default if_port #0 (the internal transceiver)
LILO: linux ether=3,0,0,0,eth0
Problem: 3c503: configured interrupt X invalid, will use autoIRQ.
Reason: The 3c503 card can only use one of IRQ{5, 2/9, 3, 4} (These
are the only lines that are connected to the card.) If you pass in an
IRQ value that is not in the above set, you will get the above
message. Usually, specifying an interrupt value for the 3c503 is not
necessary. The 3c503 will autoIRQ when it gets ifconfig'ed, and pick
one of IRQ{5, 2/9, 3, 4}.
Solution: Use one of the valid IRQs listed above, or enable autoIRQ by
not specifying the IRQ line at all.
Problem: The supplied 3c503 drivers don't use the AUI (thicknet) port.
How does one choose it over the default thinnet port?
Solution: The 3c503 AUI port can be selected at boot-time for in-
kernel drivers, and at module insertion for modular drivers. The
selection is overloaded onto the low bit of the currently-unused
dev->rmem_start variable, so a boot-time parameter of:
LILO: linux ether=0,0,0,1,eth0
should work for in-kernel drivers.
To specify the AUI port when loading as a module, just append xcvr=1
to the module options line along with your I/O and IRQ values.
3.7. FAQs Not Specific to Any Card.
3.7.1. Linux and ISA Plug and Play Ethernet Cards
For best results (and minimum aggravation) it is recommended that you
use the (usually DOS) program that came with your card to disable the
PnP mechanism and set it to a fixed I/O address and IRQ. Make sure
the I/O address you use is probed by the driver at boot, or if using
modules then supply the address as an io= option in /etc/conf.modules.
You may also have to enter the BIOS/CMOS setup and mark the IRQ as
Legacy-ISA instead of PnP (if your computer has this option).
Note that you typically don't need DOS installed to run a DOS based
configuration program. You can usually just boot a DOS floppy disk and
run them from the supplied floppy disk. You can also download OpenDOS
and FreeDOS for free.
If you require PnP enabled for compatibility with some other operating
system then you will have to use the isapnptools package with linux to
configure the card(s) each time at boot. You will still have to make
sure the I/O address chosen for the card is probed by the driver or
supplied as an io= option.
3.7.2. Ethercard is Not Detected at Boot.
The usual reason for this is that people are using a kernel that does
not have support for their particular card built in. For a modular
kernel, it usually means that the required module has not been
requested for loading, or that an I/O address needs to be specified as
a module option.
If you are using a modular based kernel, such as those installed by
most of the linux distributions, then try and use the configuration
utility for the distribution to select the module for your card. For
ISA cards, it is a good idea to determine the I/O address of the card
and add it as an option (e.g. io=0x340) if the configuration utility
asks for any options. If there is no configuration utility, then you
will have to add the correct module name (and options) to
/etc/conf.modules -- see man modprobe for more details.
If you are using a pre-compiled kernel that is part of a distribution
set, then check the documentation to see which kernel you installed,
and if it was built with support for your particular card. If it
wasn't, then your options are to try and get one that has support for
your card, or build your own.
It is usually wise to build your own kernel with only the drivers you
need, as this cuts down on the kernel size (saving your precious RAM
for applications!) and reduces the number of device probes that can
upset sensitive hardware. Building a kernel is not as complicated as
it sounds. You just have to answer yes or no to a bunch of questions
about what drivers you want, and it does the rest.
The next main cause is having another device using part of the I/O
space that your card needs. Most cards are 16 or 32 bytes wide in I/O
space. If your card is set at 0x300 and 32 bytes wide, then the driver
will ask for 0x300-0x31f. If any other device driver has registered
even one port anywhere in that range, the probe will not take place at
that address and the driver will silently continue to the next of the
probed addresses. So, after booting, do a cat /proc/ioports and verify
that the full I/O space that the card will require is vacant.
Another problem is having your card jumpered to an I/O address that
isn't probed by default. The list of probed addresses for each driver
is easily found just after the text comments in the driver source.
Even if the I/O setting of your card is not in the list of probed
addresses, you can supply it at boot (for in-kernel drivers) with the
ether= command as described in ``Passing Ethernet Arguments...''
Modular drivers can make use of the io= option in /etc/conf.modules to
specify an address that isn't probed by default.
3.7.3. ifconfig reports the wrong I/O address for the card.
No it doesn't. You are just interpreting it incorrectly. This is not
a bug, and the numbers reported are correct. It just happens that some
8390 based cards (wd80x3, smc-ultra, etc) have the actual 8390 chip
living at an offset from the first assigned I/O port. This is the
value stored in dev->base_addr, and is what ifconfig reports. If you
want to see the full range of ports that your card uses, then try cat
/proc/ioports which will give the numbers you expect.
3.7.4. PCI machine detects card but driver fails probe.
Some PCI BIOSes may not enable all PCI cards at power-up, especially
if the BIOS option `PNP OS' is enabled. This mis-feature is to support
the current release of Windows which still uses some real-mode
drivers. Either disable this option, or try and upgrade to a newer
driver which has the code to enable a disabled card.
3.7.5. Shared Memory ISA cards in PCI Machine do not work ( 0xffff )
This will usually show up as reads of lots of 0xffff values. No
shared memory cards of any type will work in a PCI machine unless you
have the PCI ROM BIOS/CMOS SETUP configuration set properly. You have
to set it to allow shared memory access from the ISA bus for the
memory region that your card is trying to use. If you can't figure out
which settings are applicable then ask your supplier or local computer
guru. For AMI BIOS, there is usually a "Plug and Play" section where
there will be an ``ISA Shared Memory Size'' and ``ISA Shared Memory
Base'' settings. For cards like the wd8013 and SMC Ultra, change the
size from the default of `Disabled' to 16kB, and change the base to
the shared memory address of your card.
3.7.6. Card seems to send data but never receives anything.
Do a cat /proc/interrupts. A running total of the number of interrupt
events your card generates will be in the list given from the above.
If it is zero and/or doesn't increase when you try to use the card
then there is probably a physical interrupt conflict with another
device installed in the computer (regardless of whether or not the
other device has a driver installed/available). Change the IRQ of one
of the two devices to a free IRQ.
3.7.7. Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) Support
Werner Almesberger has been working on ATM support for linux. He has
been working with the Efficient Networks ENI155p board (Efficient
Networks <http://www.efficient.com/>) and the Zeitnet ZN1221 board
(Zeitnet <http://www.zeitnet.com/>).
Werner says that the driver for the ENI155p is rather stable, while
the driver for the ZN1221 is presently unfinished.
Check the latest/updated status at the following URL:
Linux ATM Support <http://lrcwww.epfl.ch/linux-atm/>
3.7.8. Gigabyte Ethernet Support
Is there any gigabyte ethernet support for Linux?
Yes, there are currently at least two. A driver for the Packet
Engines G-NIC PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter is available in the v2.0
and v2.2 kernels For more details, support, and driver updates, see:
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/yellowfin.html
The acenic.c driver available in the v2.2 kernels can be used for the
Alteon AceNIC Gigabit Ethernet card and other Tigon based cards such
as the 3Com 3c985. The driver should also work on the NetGear GA620,
however this has yet to be verified.
3.7.9. FDDI Support
Is there FDDI support for Linux?
Yes. Larry Stefani has written a driver for v2.0 with Digital's DEFEA
(FDDI EISA) and DEFPA (FDDI PCI) cards. This was included into the
v2.0.24 kernel. Currently no other cards are supported though.
3.7.10. Full Duplex Support
Will Full Duplex give me 20MBps? Does Linux support it?
Cameron Spitzer writes the following about full duplex 10Base-T cards:
``If you connect it to a full duplex switched hub, and your system is
fast enough and not doing much else, it can keep the link busy in both
directions. There is no such thing as full duplex 10BASE-2 or
10BASE-5 (thin and thick coax). Full Duplex works by disabling
collision detection in the adapter. That's why you can't do it with
coax; the LAN won't run that way. 10BASE-T (RJ45 interface) uses
separate wires for send and receive, so it's possible to run both ways
at the same time. The switching hub takes care of the collision
problem. The signalling rate is 10 Mbps.''
So as you can see, you still will only be able to receive or transmit
at 10Mbps, and hence don't expect a 2x performance increase. As to
whether it is supported or not, that depends on the card and possibly
the driver. Some cards may do auto-negotiation, some may need driver
support, and some may need the user to select an option in a card's
EEPROM configuration. Only the serious/heavy user would notice the
difference between the two modes anyway.
3.7.11. Ethernet Cards for Linux on SMP Machines
If you spent the extra money on a multi processor (MP) computer then
buy a good ethernet card as well. For v2.0 kernels it wasn't really an
issue, but it definitely is for v2.2. Most of the older non-
intelligent (e.g. ISA bus PIO and shared memory design) cards were
never designed with any consideration for use on a MP machine. The
executive summary is to buy an intelligent modern design card and make
sure the driver has been written (or updated) to handle MP operation.
(The key words here are `modern design' - the PCI-NE2000's are just a
10+ year old design on a modern bus.) Looking for the text spin_lock
in the driver source is a good indication that the driver has been
written to deal with MP operation. The full details of why you should
buy a good card for MP use (and what happens if you dont) follow.
In v2.0 kernels, only one processor was allowed `in kernel' (i.e.
changing kernel data and/or running device drivers) at any given time.
So from the point of view of the card (and the associated driver)
nothing was different from uni processor (UP) operation and things
just continued to work. (This was the easiest way to get a working MP
version of Linux - one big lock around the whole kernel only allows
one processor in at a time. This way you know that you won't have two
processors trying to change the same thing at the same time!)
The downside to only allowing one processor in the kernel at a time
was that you only got MP performance if the running programs were self
contained and calculation intensive. If the programs did a lot of
input/output (I/O) such as reading or writing data to disk or over a
network, then all but one of the processors would be stalled waiting
on their I/O requests to be completed while the one processor running
in kernel frantically tries to run all the device drivers to fill the
I/O requests. The kernel becomes the bottleneck and since there is
only one processor running in the kernel, the performance of a MP
machine in the heavy I/O, single-lock case quickly degrades close to
that of a single processor machine.
Since this is clearly less than ideal (esp. for file/WWW servers,
routers, etc.) the v2.2 kernels have finer grained locking - meaning
that more than one processor can be in the kernel at a time. Instead
of one big lock around the whole kernel, there are a lot of smaller
locks protecting critical data from being manipulated by more than one
processor at a time - e.g. one processor can be running the driver for
the network card, while another processor is running the driver for
the disk drive at the same time.
Okay, with that all in mind here are the snags: The finer locking
means that you can have one processor trying to send data out through
an ethernet driver while another processor tries to access the same
driver/card to do something else (such as get the card statistics for
cat /proc/net/dev). Oops - your card stats just got sent out over the
wire, while you got data for your stats instead. Yes, the card got
confused by being asked to do two (or more!) things at once, and
chances are it crashed your machine in the process.
So, the driver that worked for UP is no longer good enough - it needs
to be updated with locks that control access to the underlying card
so that the three tasks of receive, transmit and manipulation of
configuration data are serialized to the degree required by the card
for stable operation. The scary part here is that a driver not yet
updated with locks for stable MP operation will probably appear to be
working in a MP machine under light network load, but will crash the
machine or at least exhibit strange behaviour when two (or more!)
processors try to do more than one of these three tasks at the same
time.
The updated MP aware ethernet driver will (at a minimum) require a
lock around the driver that limits access at the entry points from the
kernel into the driver to `one at a time please'. With this in place,
things will be serialized so that the underlying hardware should be
treated just as if it was being used in a UP machine, and so it should
be stable. The downside is that the one lock around the whole ethernet
driver has the same negative performance implications that having one
big lock around the whole kernel had (but on a smaller scale) - i.e.
you can only have one processor dealing with the card at a time.
[Technical Note: The performance impact may also include increased
interrupt latencies if the locks that need to be added are of the
irqsave type and they are held for a long time.]
Possible improvements on this situation can be made in two ways. You
can try to minimize the time between when the lock is taken and when
it is released, and/or you can implement finer grained locking within
the driver (e.g. a lock around the whole driver would be overkill if a
lock or two protecting against simultaneous access to a couple of
sensitive registers/settings on the card would suffice).
However, for older non-intelligent cards that were never designed with
MP use in mind, neither of these improvements may be feasible. Worse
yet is that the non-intelligent cards typically require the processor
to move the data between the card and the computer memory, so in a
worst case scenario the lock will be held the whole time that it takes
to move each 1.5kB data packet over an ISA bus.
The more modern intelligent cards typically move network data directly
to and from the computer memory without any help from a processor.
This is a big win, since the lock is then only held for the short time
it takes the processor to tell the card where in memory to get/store
the next network data packet. More modern card designs are less apt to
require a single big lock around the whole driver as well.
3.7.12. Ethernet Cards for Linux on Alpha/AXP PCI Boards
As of v2.0, only the 3c509, depca, de4x5, pcnet32, and all the 8390
drivers (wd, smc-ultra, ne, 3c503, etc.) have been made `architecture
independent' so as to work on the DEC Alpha CPU based systems. Other
updated PCI drivers from Donald's WWW page may also work as these have
been written with architecture independence in mind.
Note that the changes that are required to make a driver architecture
independent aren't that complicated. You only need to do the
following:
-multiply all jiffies related values by HZ/100 to account for the
different HZ value that the Alpha uses. (i.e timeout=2; becomes
timeout=2*HZ/100;)
-replace any I/O memory (640k to 1MB) pointer dereferences with the
appropriate readb() writeb() readl() writel() calls, as shown in this
example.
______________________________________________________________________
- int *mem_base = (int *)dev->mem_start;
- mem_base[0] = 0xba5eba5e;
+ unsigned long mem_base = dev->mem_start;
+ writel(0xba5eba5e, mem_base);
______________________________________________________________________
-replace all memcpy() calls that have I/O memory as source or target
destinations with the appropriate one of memcpy_fromio() or
memcpy_toio().
Details on handling memory accesses in an architecture independent
fashion are documented in the file linux/Documentation/IO-mapping.txt
that comes with recent kernels.
3.7.13. Ethernet for Linux on SUN/Sparc Hardware.
For the most up to date information on Sparc stuff, try the following
URL:
Linux Sparc <http://www.geog.ubc.ca/sparc>
Note that some Sparc ethernet hardware gets its MAC address from the
host computer, and hence you can end up with multiple interfaces all
with the same MAC address. If you need to put more than one interface
on the same net then use the hw option to ifconfig to assign unique
MAC address.
Issues regarding porting PCI drivers to the Sparc platform are similar
to those mentioned above for the AXP platform. In addition there may
be some endian issues, as the Sparc is big endian, and the AXP and
ix86 are little endian.
3.7.14. Ethernet for Linux on Other Hardware.
There are several other hardware platforms that Linux can run on, such
as Atari/Amiga (m68k). As in the Sparc case it is best to check with
the home site of each Linux port to that platform to see what is
currently supported. (Links to such sites are welcome here - send
them in!)
3.7.15. Linking 10 or 100 BaseT without a Hub
Can I link 10/100BaseT (RJ45) based systems together without a hub?
You can link 2 machines easily, but no more than that, without extra
devices/gizmos. See ``Twisted Pair'' -- it explains how to do it. And
no, you can't hack together a hub just by crossing a few wires and
stuff. It's pretty much impossible to do the collision signal right
without duplicating a hub.
3.7.16. SIOCSIFxxx: No such device
I get a bunch of `SIOCSIFxxx: No such device' messages at boot,
followed by a `SIOCADDRT: Network is unreachable' What is wrong?
Your ethernet device was not detected at boot/module insertion time,
and when ifconfig and route are run, they have no device to work with.
Use dmesg | more to review the boot messages and see if there are any
messages about detecting an ethernet card.
3.7.17. SIOCSFFLAGS: Try again
I get `SIOCSFFLAGS: Try again' when I run `ifconfig' -- Huh?
Some other device has taken the IRQ that your ethercard is trying to
use, and so the ethercard can't use the IRQ. You don't necessairly
need to reboot to resolve this, as some devices only grab the IRQs
when they need them and then release them when they are done. Examples
are some sound cards, serial ports, floppy disk driver, etc. You can
type cat /proc/interrupts to see which interrupts are presently in
use. Most of the Linux ethercard drivers only grab the IRQ when they
are opened for use via `ifconfig'. If you can get the other device to
`let go' of the required IRQ line, then you should be able to `Try
again' with ifconfig.
3.7.18. Using `ifconfig' and Link UNSPEC with HW-addr of
00:00:00:00:00:00
When I run ifconfig with no arguments, it reports that LINK is UNSPEC
(instead of 10Mbs Ethernet) and it also says that my hardware address
is all zeros.
This is because people are running a newer version of the `ifconfig'
program than their kernel version. This new version of ifconfig is not
able to report these properties when used in conjunction with an older
kernel. You can either upgrade your kernel, `downgrade' ifconfig, or
simply ignore it. The kernel knows your hardware address, so it really
doesn't matter if ifconfig can't read it.
You may also get strange information if the ifconfig program you are
using is a lot older than the kernel you are using.
3.7.19. Huge Number of RX and TX Errors
When I run ifconfig with no arguments, it reports that I have a huge
error count in both rec'd and transmitted packets. It all seems to
work ok -- What is wrong?
Look again. It says RX packets big number PAUSE errors 0 PAUSE dropped
0 PAUSE overrun 0. And the same for the TX column. Hence the big
numbers you are seeing are the total number of packets that your
machine has rec'd and transmitted. If you still find it confusing,
try typing cat /proc/net/dev instead.
3.7.20. Entries in /dev/ for Ethercards
I have /dev/eth0 as a link to /dev/xxx. Is this right?
Contrary to what you have heard, the files in /dev/* are not used.
You can delete any /dev/wd0, /dev/ne0 and similar entries.
3.7.21. Linux and ``trailers''
Should I disable trailers when I `ifconfig' my ethercard?
You can't disable trailers, and you shouldn't want to. `Trailers' are
a hack to avoid data copying in the networking layers. The idea was to
use a trivial fixed-size header of size `H', put the variable-size
header info at the end of the packet, and allocate all packets `H'
bytes before the start of a page. While it was a good idea, it turned
out to not work well in practice. If someone suggests the use of
`-trailers', note that it is the equivalent of sacrificial goats
blood. It won't do anything to solve the problem, but if problem fixes
itself then someone can claim deep magical knowledge.
3.7.22. Access to the raw Ethernet Device
How do I get access to the raw ethernet device in linux, without going
through TCP/IP and friends?
______________________________________________________________________
int s=socket(AF_INET,SOCK_PACKET,htons(ETH_P_ALL));
______________________________________________________________________
This gives you a socket receiving every protocol type. Do recvfrom()
calls to it and it will fill the sockaddr with device type in
sa_family and the device name in the sa_data array. I don't know who
originally invented SOCK_PACKET for Linux (its been in for ages) but
its superb stuff. You can use it to send stuff raw too via sendto()
calls. You have to have root access to do either of course.
4. Performance Tips
Here are some tips that you can use if you are suffering from low
ethernet throughput, or to gain a bit more speed on those ftp
transfers.
The ttcp.c program is a good test for measuring raw throughput speed.
Another common trick is to do a ftp> get large_file /dev/null where
large_file is > 1MB and residing in the buffer cache on the Tx'ing
machine. (Do the `get' at least twice, as the first time will be
priming the buffer cache on the Tx'ing machine.) You want the file in
the buffer cache because you are not interested in combining the file
access speed from the disk into your measurement. Which is also why
you send the incoming data to /dev/null instead of onto the disk.
4.1. General Concepts
Even an 8 bit card is able to receive back-to-back packets without any
problems. The difficulty arises when the computer doesn't get the Rx'd
packets off the card quick enough to make room for more incoming
packets. If the computer does not quickly clear the card's memory of
the packets already received, the card will have no place to put the
new packet.
In this case the card either drops the new packet, or writes over top
of a previously received packet. Either one seriously interrupts the
smooth flow of traffic by causing/requesting re-transmissions and can
seriously degrade performance by up to a factor of 5!
Cards with more onboard memory are able to ``buffer'' more packets,
and thus can handle larger bursts of back-to-back packets without
dropping packets. This in turn means that the card does not require
as low a latency from the the host computer with respect to pulling
the packets out of the buffer to avoid dropping packets.
Most 8 bit cards have an 8kB buffer, and most 16 bit cards have a 16kB
buffer. Most Linux drivers will reserve 3kB of that buffer (for two Tx
buffers), leaving only 5kB of receive space for an 8 bit card. This is
room enough for only three full sized (1500 bytes) ethernet packets.
4.2. ISA Cards and ISA Bus Speed
As mentioned above, if the packets are removed from the card fast
enough, then a drop/overrun condition won't occur even when the amount
of Rx packet buffer memory is small. The factor that sets the rate at
which packets are removed from the card to the computer's memory is
the speed of the data path that joins the two -- that being the ISA
bus speed. (If the CPU is a dog-slow 386sx-16, then this will also
play a role.)
The recommended ISA bus clock is about 8MHz, but many motherboards and
peripheral devices can be run at higher frequencies. The clock
frequency for the ISA bus can usually be set in the CMOS setup, by
selecting a divisor of the mainboard/CPU clock frequency. Some ISA and
PCI/ISA mainboards may not have this option, and so you are stuck with
the factory default.
For example, here are some receive speeds as measured by the TTCP
program on a 40MHz 486, with an 8 bit WD8003EP card, for different
ISA bus speeds.
______________________________________________________________________
ISA Bus Speed (MHz) Rx TTCP (kB/s)
------------------- --------------
6.7 740
13.4 970
20.0 1030
26.7 1075
______________________________________________________________________
You would be hard pressed to do better than 1075kB/s with any 10Mb/s
ethernet card, using TCP/IP. However, don't expect every system to
work at fast ISA bus speeds. Most systems will not function properly
at speeds above 13MHz. (Also, some PCI systems have the ISA bus speed
fixed at 8MHz, so that the end user does not have the option of
increasing it.)
In addition to faster transfer speeds, one will usually also benefit
from a reduction in CPU usage due to the shorter duration memory and
I/O cycles. (Note that hard disks and video cards located on the ISA
bus will also usually experience a performance increase from an
increased ISA bus speed.)
Be sure to back up your data prior to experimenting with ISA bus
speeds in excess of 8MHz, and thouroughly test that all ISA
peripherals are operating properly after making any speed increases.
4.3. Setting the TCP Rx Window
Once again, cards with small amounts of onboard RAM and relatively
slow data paths between the card and the computer's memory run into
trouble. The default TCP Rx window setting is 32kB, which means that a
fast computer on the same subnet as you can dump 32k of data on you
without stopping to see if you received any of it okay.
Recent versions of the route command have the ability to set the size
of this window on the fly. Usually it is only for the local net that
this window must be reduced, as computers that are behind a couple of
routers or gateways are `buffered' enough to not pose a problem. An
example usage would be:
______________________________________________________________________
route add <whatever> ... window <win_size>
______________________________________________________________________
where win_size is the size of the window you wish to use (in bytes).
An 8 bit 3c503 card on an ISA bus operating at a speed of 8MHz or less
would work well with a window size of about 4kB. Too large a window
will cause overruns and dropped packets, and a drastic reduction in
ethernet throughput. You can check the operating status by doing a cat
/proc/net/dev which will display any dropped or overrun conditions
that occurred.
4.4. Increasing NFS performance
Some people have found that using 8 bit cards in NFS clients causes
poorer than expected performance, when using 8kB (native Sun) NFS
packet size.
The possible reason for this could be due to the difference in on
board buffer size between the 8 bit and the 16 bit cards. The maximum
ethernet packet size is about 1500 bytes. Now that 8kB NFS packet will
arrive as about 6 back to back maximum size ethernet packets. Both the
8 and 16 bit cards have no problem Rx'ing back to back packets. The
problem arises when the machine doesn't remove the packets from the
cards buffer in time, and the buffer overflows. The fact that 8 bit
cards take an extra ISA bus cycle per transfer doesn't help either.
What you can do if you have an 8 bit card is either set the NFS
transfer size to 2kB (or even 1kB), or try increasing the ISA bus
speed in order to get the card's buffer cleared out faster. I have
found that an old WD8003E card at 8MHz (with no other system load) can
keep up with a large receive at 2kB NFS size, but not at 4kB, where
performance was degraded by a factor of three.
On the other hand, if the default mount option is to use 1kB size and
you have at least a 16 bit ISA card, you may find a significant
increase in going to 4kB (or even 8kB).
5. Vendor/Manufacturer/Model Specific Information
The following lists many cards in alphabetical order by vendor name
and then product identifier. Beside each product ID, you will see
either `Supported', `Semi-Supported' or `Not Supported'.
Supported means that a driver for that card exists, and many people
are happily using it and it seems quite reliable.
Semi-Supported means that a driver exists, but at least one of the
following descriptions is true: (1) The driver and/or hardware are
buggy, which may cause poor performance, failing connections or even
crashes. (2) The driver is new or the card is fairly uncommon, and
hence the driver has seen very little use/testing and the driver
author has had very little feedback. Obviously (2) is preferable to
(1), and the individual description of the card/driver should make it
clear which one holds true. In either case, you will probably have to
answer `Y' when asked ``Prompt for development and/or incomplete
code/drivers?'' when running make config.
Not Supported means there is not a driver currently available for that
card. This could be due to a lack of interest in hardware that is
rare/uncommon, or because the vendors won't release the hardware
documentation required to write a driver.
Note that the difference between `Supported' and `Semi-Supported' is
rather subjective, and is based on user feedback observed in newsgroup
postings and mailing list messages. (After all, it is impossible for
one person to test all drivers with all cards for each kernel
version!!!) So be warned that you may find a card listed as semi-
supported works perfectly for you (which is great), or that a card
listed as supported gives you no end of troubles and problems (which
is not so great).
After the status, the name of the driver given in the linux kernel is
listed. This will also be the name of the driver module that would be
used in the alias eth0 driver_name line that is found in the
/etc/conf.modules module configuration file.
5.1. 3Com
If you are not sure what your card is, but you think it is a 3Com
card, you can probably figure it out from the assembly number. 3Com
has a document `Identifying 3Com Adapters By Assembly Number' (ref
24500002) that would most likely clear things up. See ``Technical
Information from 3Com'' for info on how to get documents from 3Com.
Also note that 3Com has a FTP site with various goodies: ftp.3Com.com
that you may want to check out.
For those of you browsing this document by a WWW browser, you can try
3Com's WWW site as well.
5.1.1. 3c501
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: 3c501
This obsolete stone-age 8 bit card is really too brain-damaged to use.
Avoid it like the plague. Do not purchase this card, even as a joke.
It's performance is horrible, and it breaks in many ways.
For those not yet convinced, the 3c501 can only do one thing at a time
-- while you are removing one packet from the single-packet buffer it
cannot receive another packet, nor can it receive a packet while
loading a transmit packet. This was fine for a network between two
8088-based computers where processing each packet and replying took
10's of msecs, but modern networks send back-to-back packets for
almost every transaction.
AutoIRQ works, DMA isn't used, the autoprobe only looks at 0x280 and
0x300, and the debug level is set with the third boot-time argument.
Once again, the use of a 3c501 is strongly discouraged! Even more so
with a IP multicast kernel, as you will grind to a halt while
listening to all multicast packets. See the comments at the top of the
source code for more details.
5.1.2. EtherLink II, 3c503, 3c503/16
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c503 (+8390)
The 3c503 does not have ``EEPROM setup'', so a diagnostic/setup
program isn't needed before running the card with Linux. The shared
memory address of the 3c503 is set using jumpers that are shared with
the boot PROM address. This is confusing to people familiar with other
ISA cards, where you always leave the jumper set to ``disable'' unless
you have a boot PROM.
These cards should be about the same speed as the same bus width
WD80x3, but turn out to be actually a bit slower. These shared-memory
ethercards also have a programmed I/O mode that doesn't use the 8390
facilities (their engineers found too many bugs!) The Linux 3c503
driver can also work with the 3c503 in programmed-I/O mode, but this
is slower and less reliable than shared memory mode. Also, programmed-
I/O mode is not as well tested when updating the drivers. You
shouldn't use the programmed-I/O mode unless you need it for MS-DOS
compatibility.
The 3c503's IRQ line is set in software, with no hints from an EEPROM.
Unlike the MS-DOS drivers, the Linux driver has capability to autoIRQ:
it uses the first available IRQ line in {5,2/9,3,4}, selected each
time the card is ifconfig'ed. (Older driver versions selected the IRQ
at boot time.) The ioctl() call in `ifconfig' will return EAGAIN if no
IRQ line is available at that time.
Some common problems that people have with the 503 are discussed in
``Problems with...''.
If you intend on using this driver as a loadable module you should
probably see ``Using the Ethernet Drivers as Modules'' for module
specific information.
Note that some old diskless 386 workstations have an on board 3c503
(made by 3Com and sold under different names, like `Bull') but the
vendor ID is not a 3Com ID and so it won't be detected. More details
can be found in the Etherboot package, which you will need anyways to
boot these diskless boxes.
5.1.3. Etherlink Plus 3c505
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: 3c505
This is a driver that was written by Craig Southeren
geoffw@extro.ucc.su.oz.au. These cards also use the i82586 chip.
There are not that many of these cards about. It is included in the
standard kernel, but it is classed as an alpha driver. See ``Alpha
Drivers'' for important information on using alpha-test ethernet
drivers with Linux.
There is also the file /usr/src/linux/drivers/net/README.3c505 that
you should read if you are going to use one of these cards. It
contains various options that you can enable/disable.
5.1.4. Etherlink-16 3c507
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: 3c507
This card uses one of the Intel chips, and the development of the
driver is closely related to the development of the Intel Ether
Express driver. The driver is included in the standard kernel
release, but as an alpha driver. See ``Alpha Drivers'' for important
information on using alpha-test ethernet drivers with Linux.
5.1.5. Etherlink III, 3c509 / 3c509B
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c509
This card is fairly inexpensive and has good performance for an ISA
non-bus-master design. The drawbacks are that the original 3c509
requires very low interrupt latency. The 3c509B shouldn't suffer from
the same problem, due to having a larger buffer. (See below.) These
cards use PIO transfers, similar to a ne2000 card, and so a shared
memory card such as a wd8013 will be more efficient in comparison.
The original 3c509 has a small packet buffer (4kB total, 2kB Rx, 2kB
Tx), causing the driver to occasionally drop a packet if interrupts
are masked for too long. To minimize this problem, you can try
unmasking interrupts during IDE disk transfers (see man hdparm) and/or
increasing your ISA bus speed so IDE transfers finish sooner.
The newer model 3c509B has 8kB on board, and the buffer can be split
4/4, 5/3 or 6/2 for Rx/Tx. This setting is changed with the DOS
configuration utility, and is stored on the EEPROM. This should
alleviate the above problem with the original 3c509.
3c509B users should use either the supplied DOS utility to disable the
plug and play support, and to set the output media to what they
require. The linux driver currently does not support the Autodetect
media setting, so you have to select 10Base-T or 10Base-2 or AUI.
Note that to turn off PnP entirely, you should do a 3C5X9CFG
/PNP:DISABLE and then follow that with a hard reset to ensure that it
takes effect.
Some people ask about the ``Server or Workstation'' and ``Highest
Modem Speed'' settings presented in the DOS configuration utility.
Donald writes ``These are only hints to the drivers, and the Linux
driver does not use these parameters: it always optimizes for high
throughput rather than low latency (`Server'). Low latency was
critically important for old, non-windowed, IPX throughput. To reduce
the latency the MS-DOS driver for the 3c509 disables interrupts for
some operations, blocking serial port interrupts. Thus the need for
the `modem speed' setting. The Linux driver avoids the need to
disable interrupts for long periods by operating only on whole packets
e.g. by not starting to transmit a packet until it is completely
transferred to the card.''
Note that the ISA card detection uses a different method than most
cards. Basically, you ask the cards to respond by sending data to an
ID_PORT (port 0x100 to 0x1ff on intervals of 0x10). This detection
method means that a particular card will always get detected first in
a multiple ISA 3c509 configuration. The card with the lowest hardware
ethernet address will always end up being eth0. This shouldn't matter
to anyone, except for those people who want to assign a 6 byte
hardware address to a particular interface. If you have multiple
3c509 cards, it is best to append ether=0,0,ethN commands without the
I/O port specified (i.e. use I/O=zero) and allow the probe to sort out
which card is first. Using a non-zero I/O value will ensure that it
does not detect all your cards, so don't do it.
If this really bothers you, have a look at Donald's latest driver, as
you may be able to use a 0x3c509 value in the unused mem address
fields to order the detection to suit your needs.
5.1.6. 3c515
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c515
This is 3Com's ISA 100Mbps offering, codenamed ``CorkScrew''. A
relatively new driver from Donald for these cards is included in the
v2.2 kernels. For the most up to date information, you should
probably look on the Vortex page:
Vortex <http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html>
5.1.7. 3c523
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: 3c523
This MCA bus card uses the i82586, and Chris Beauregard has modified
the ni52 driver to work with these cards. The driver for it can be
found in the v2.2 kernel source tree.
More details can be found on the MCA-Linux page at
http://glycerine.cetmm.uni.edu/mca/
5.1.8. 3c527
Status: Not Supported.
Yes, another MCA card. No, not too much interest in it. Better
chances with the 3c529 if you are stuck with MCA.
5.1.9. 3c529
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c509
This card actually uses the same chipset as the 3c509. Donald
actually put hooks into the 3c509 driver to check for MCA cards after
probing for EISA cards, and before probing for ISA cards, long before
MCA support was added to the kernel. The required MCA probe code is
included in the driver shipped with v2.2 kernels. More details can be
found on the MCA-Linux page at:
http://glycerine.cetmm.uni.edu/mca/
5.1.10. 3c562
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c589 (distributed separately)
This PCMCIA card is the combination of a 3c589B ethernet card with a
modem. The modem appears as a standard modem to the end user. The only
difficulty is getting the two separate linux drivers to share one
interrupt. There are a couple of new registers and some hardware
interrupt sharing support. You need to use a v2.0 or newer kernel
that has the support for interrupt sharing.
Thanks again to Cameron for getting a sample unit and documentation
sent off to David Hinds. Look for support in David's PCMCIA package
release.
See ``PCMCIA Support'' for more info on PCMCIA chipsets, socket
enablers, etc.
5.1.11. 3c575
Status: Unknown.
A driver for this PCMCIA card is under development and hopefully will
be included in David's PCMCIA package in the future. Best to check
the PCMCIA package to get the current status.
5.1.12. 3c579
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c509
The EISA version of the 509. The current EISA version uses the same 16
bit wide chip rather than a 32 bit interface, so the performance
increase isn't stunning. Make sure the card is configured for EISA
addressing mode. Read the above 3c509 section for info on the driver.
5.1.13. 3c589 / 3c589B
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: 3c589
Many people have been using this PCMCIA card for quite some time now.
Note that support for it is not (at present) included in the default
kernel source tree. The "B" in the name means the same here as it
does for the 3c509 case.
There are drivers available on Donald's ftp site and in David Hinds
PCMCIA package. You will also need a supported PCMCIA controller
chipset. See ``PCMCIA Support'' for more info on PCMCIA drivers,
chipsets, socket enablers, etc.
5.1.14. 3c590 / 3c595
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c59x
These ``Vortex'' cards are for PCI bus machines, with the '590 being
10Mbps and the '595 being 3Com's 100Mbs offering. Also note that you
can run the '595 as a '590 (i.e. in a 10Mbps mode). The driver is
included in the v2.0 kernel source, but is also continually being
updated. If you have problems with the driver in the v2.0 kernel, you
can get an updated driver from the following URL:
Vortex <http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html>
Note that there are two different 3c590 cards out there, early models
that had 32kB of on-board memory, and later models that only have 8kB
of memory. Chances are you won't be able to buy a new 3c59x for much
longer, as it is being replaced with the 3c90x card. If you are buying
a used one off somebody, try and get the 32kB version. The 3c595 cards
have 64kB, as you can't get away with only 8kB RAM at 100Mbps!
A thanks to Cameron Spitzer and Terry Murphy of 3Com for sending cards
and documentation to Donald so he could write the driver.
Donald has set up a mailing list for Vortex driver support. To join
the list, just do:
echo subscribe | /bin/mail linux-vortex-request@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov
5.1.15. 3c592 / 3c597
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c59x
These are the EISA versions of the 3c59x series of cards. The
3c592/3c597 (aka Demon) should work with the vortex driver discussed
above.
5.1.16. 3c900 / 3c905 / 3c905B
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c59x
These cards (aka `Boomerang', aka EtherLink III XL) have been released
to take over the place of the 3c590/3c595 cards.
The support for the Cyclone `B' revision was only recently added. To
use this card with older v2.0 kernels, you must obtain the updated
3c59x.c driver from Donald's site at:
Vortex-Page <http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html>
If in doubt about anything then check out the above WWW page. Donald
has set up a mailing list for Vortex driver support announcements and
etc. To join the list, just do:
echo subscribe | /bin/mail linux-vortex-request@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov
5.1.17. 3c985
Status: Supported, Driver Name: acenic
This driver, by Jes Sorensen, is available in v2.2 kernels It supports
several other Gigabit cards in addition to the 3Com model.
5.2. Accton
5.2.1. Accton MPX
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne (+8390)
Don't let the name fool you. This is still supposed to be a NE2000
compatible card, and should work with the ne2000 driver.
5.2.2. Accton EN1203, EN1207, EtherDuo-PCI
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
This is another implementation of the DEC 21040 PCI chip. The EN1207
card has the 21140, and also has a 10Base-2 connector, which has
proved troublesome for some people in terms of selecting that media.
Using the card with 10Base-T and 100Base-T media have worked for
others though. So as with all purchases, you should try and make sure
you can return it if it doesn't work for you.
See ``DEC 21040'' for more information on these cards, and the present
driver situation.
5.2.3. Accton EN2209 Parallel Port Adaptor (EtherPocket)
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ?
A driver for these parallel port adapters is available but not yet
part of the 2.0 or 2.1 kernel source. You have to get the driver from:
http://www.unix-ag.uni-siegen.de/~nils/accton_linux.html
5.2.4. Accton EN2212 PCMCIA Card
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ?
David Hinds has been working on a driver for this card, and you are
best to check the latest release of his PCMCIA package to see what the
present status is.
5.3. Allied Telesyn/Telesis
5.3.1. AT1500
Status: Supported, Driver Name: lance
These are a series of low-cost ethercards using the 79C960 version of
the AMD LANCE. These are bus-master cards, and hence one of the faster
ISA bus ethercards available.
DMA selection and chip numbering information can be found in ``AMD
LANCE''.
More technical information on AMD LANCE based Ethernet cards can be
found in ``Notes on AMD...''.
5.3.2. AT1700
Status: Supported, Driver Name: at1700
Note that to access this driver during make config you still have to
answer `Y' when asked ``Prompt for development and/or incomplete
code/drivers?'' at the first. This is simply due to lack of feedback
on the driver stability due to it being a relatively rare card. If
you have problems with the driver that ships with the kernel then you
may be interested in the alternative driver available at:
http://www.cc.hit-u.ac.jp/nagoya/at1700/
The Allied Telesis AT1700 series ethercards are based on the Fujitsu
MB86965. This chip uses a programmed I/O interface, and a pair of
fixed-size transmit buffers. This allows small groups of packets to be
sent back-to-back, with a short pause while switching buffers.
A unique feature is the ability to drive 150ohm STP (Shielded Twisted
Pair) cable commonly installed for Token Ring, in addition to 10baseT
100ohm UTP (unshielded twisted pair). A fibre optic version of the
card (AT1700FT) exists as well.
The Fujitsu chip used on the AT1700 has a design flaw: it can only be
fully reset by doing a power cycle of the machine. Pressing the reset
button doesn't reset the bus interface. This wouldn't be so bad,
except that it can only be reliably detected when it has been freshly
reset. The solution/work-around is to power-cycle the machine if the
kernel has a problem detecting the AT1700.
5.3.3. AT2450
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
This is the PCI version of the AT1500, and it doesn't suffer from the
problems that the Boca 79c970 PCI card does. DMA selection and chip
numbering information can be found in ``AMD LANCE''.
More technical information on AMD LANCE based Ethernet cards can be
found in ``Notes on AMD...''.
5.3.4. AT2500
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: rtl8139
This card uses the RealTek 8139 chip - see the section ``RealTek
8139''.
5.3.5. AT2540FX
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: eepro100
This card uses the i82557 chip, and hence may/should work with the
eepro100 driver. If you try this please send in a report so this
information can be updated.
5.4. AMD / Advanced Micro Devices
Carl Ching of AMD was kind enough to provide a very detailed
description of all the relevant AMD ethernet products which helped
clear up this section.
5.4.1. AMD LANCE (7990, 79C960/961/961A, PCnet-ISA)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: lance
There really is no AMD ethernet card. You are probably reading this
because the only markings you could find on your card said AMD and the
above number. The 7990 is the original `LANCE' chip, but most stuff
(including this document) refer to all these similar chips as `LANCE'
chips. (...incorrectly, I might add.)
These above numbers refer to chips from AMD that are the heart of many
ethernet cards. For example, the Allied Telesis AT1500 (see
``AT1500'') and the NE1500/2100 (see ``NE1500'') use these chips.
The 7990/79c90 have long been replaced by newer versions. The 79C960
(a.k.a. PCnet-ISA) essentially contains the 79c90 core, along with all
the other hardware support required, which allows a single-chip
ethernet solution. The 79c961 (PCnet-ISA+) is a jumperless Plug and
Play version of the '960. The final chip in the ISA series is the
79c961A (PCnet-ISA II), which adds full duplex capabilities. All
cards with one of these chips should work with the lance.c driver,
with the exception of very old cards that used the original 7990 in a
shared memory configuration. These old cards can be spotted by the
lack of jumpers for a DMA channel.
One common problem people have is the `busmaster arbitration failure'
message. This is printed out when the LANCE driver can't get access to
the bus after a reasonable amount of time has elapsed (50us). This
usually indicates that the motherboard implementation of bus-mastering
DMA is broken, or some other device is hogging the bus, or there is a
DMA channel conflict. If your BIOS setup has the `GAT option' (for
Guaranteed Access Time) then try toggling/altering that setting to see
if it helps.
Also note that the driver only looks at the addresses: 0x300, 0x320,
0x340, 0x360 for a valid card, and any address supplied by an ether=
boot argument is silently ignored (this will be fixed) so make sure
your card is configured for one of the above I/O addresses for now.
The driver will still work fine, even if more than 16MB of memory is
installed, since low-memory `bounce-buffers' are used when needed
(i.e. any data from above 16MB is copied into a buffer below 16MB
before being given to the card to transmit.)
The DMA channel can be set with the low bits of the otherwise-unused
dev->mem_start value (a.k.a. PARAM_1). (see ``PARAM_1'') If unset it
is probed for by enabling each free DMA channel in turn and checking
if initialization succeeds.
The HP-J2405A board is an exception: with this board it's easy to read
the EEPROM-set values for the IRQ, and DMA.
See ``Notes on AMD...'' for more info on these chips.
5.4.2. AMD 79C965 (PCnet-32)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
This is the PCnet-32 -- a 32 bit bus-master version of the original
LANCE chip for VL-bus and local bus systems. chip. While these chips
can be operated with the standard lance.c driver, a 32 bit version
(pcnet32.c) is also available that does not have to concern itself
with any 16MB limitations associated with the ISA bus.
5.4.3. AMD 79C970/970A (PCnet-PCI)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
This is the PCnet-PCI -- similar to the PCnet-32, but designed for PCI
bus based systems. Please see the above PCnet-32 information. This
means that you need to build a kernel with PCI BIOS support enabled.
The '970A adds full duplex support along with some other features to
the original '970 design.
Note that the Boca implementation of the 79C970 fails on fast Pentium
machines. This is a hardware problem, as it affects DOS users as well.
See the Boca section for more details.
5.4.4. AMD 79C971 (PCnet-FAST)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
This is AMD's 100Mbit chip for PCI systems, which also supports full
duplex operation. It was introduced in June 1996.
5.4.5. AMD 79C972 (PCnet-FAST+)
Status: Unknown, Driver Name: pcnet32
This should also work just like the '971 but this has yet to be
confirmed.
5.4.6. AMD 79C974 (PCnet-SCSI)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
This is the PCnet-SCSI -- which is basically treated like a '970 from
an Ethernet point of view. Also see the above information. Don't ask
if the SCSI half of the chip is supported -- this is the Ethernet-
HowTo, not the SCSI-HowTo.
5.5. Ansel Communications
5.5.1. AC3200 EISA
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ac3200
Note that to access this driver during make config you still have to
answer `Y' when asked ``Prompt for development and/or incomplete
code/drivers?'' at the first. This is simply due to lack of feedback
on the driver stability due to it being a relatively rare card.
This driver is included in the present kernel as an alpha test driver.
It is based on the common NS8390 chip used in the ne2000 and wd80x3
cards. Please see ``Alpha Drivers'' in this document for important
information regarding alpha drivers.
If you use it, let one of us know how things work out, as feedback has
been low, even though the driver has been in the kernel since v1.1.25.
If you intend on using this driver as a loadable module you should
probably see ``Using the Ethernet Drivers as Modules'' for module
specific information.
5.6. Apricot
5.6.1. Apricot Xen-II On Board Ethernet
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: apricot
This on board ethernet uses an i82596 bus-master chip. It can only be
at I/O address 0x300. By looking at the driver source, it appears
that the IRQ is also hardwired to 10.
Earlier versions of the driver had a tendency to think that anything
living at 0x300 was an apricot NIC. Since then the hardware address
is checked to avoid these false detections.
5.7. Arcnet
Status: Supported, Driver Name: arcnet (arc-rimi, com90xx, com20020)
With the very low cost and better performance of ethernet, chances are
that most places will be giving away their Arcnet hardware for free,
resulting in a lot of home systems with Arcnet.
An advantage of Arcnet is that all of the cards have identical
interfaces, so one driver will work for everyone. It also has built in
error handling so that it supposedly never loses a packet. (Great for
UDP traffic!)
Avery Pennarun's arcnet driver has been in the default kernel sources
since 1.1.80. The arcnet driver uses `arc0' as its name instead of the
usual `eth0' for ethernet devices. Bug reports and success stories
can be mailed to:
apenwarr@foxnet.net
There are information files contained in the standard kernel for
setting jumpers and general hints.
Supposedly the driver also works with the 100Mbs ARCnet cards as well!
5.8. AT&T
Note that AT&T's StarLAN is an orphaned technology, like SynOptics
LattisNet, and can't be used in a standard 10Base-T environment,
without a hub that `speaks' both.
5.8.1. AT&T T7231 (LanPACER+)
Status: Not Supported.
These StarLAN cards use an interface similar to the i82586 chip. At
one point, Matthijs Melchior (matthijs.n.melchior@att.com) was playing
with the 3c507 driver, and almost had something useable working.
Haven't heard much since that.
5.9. Boca Research
Yes, they make more than just multi-port serial cards. :-)
5.9.1. Boca BEN (ISA, VLB, PCI)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: lance, pcnet32
These cards are based on AMD's PCnet chips. Perspective buyers should
be warned that many users have had endless problems with these VLB/PCI
cards. Owners of fast Pentium systems have been especially hit. Note
that this is not a driver problem, as it hits DOS/Win/NT users as
well. Boca's technical support number is (407) 241-8088, and you can
also reach them at 75300.2672@compuserve.com. The older ISA cards
don't appear to suffer the same problems.
Donald did a comparitive test with a Boca PCI card and a similar
Allied Telsyn PCnet/PCI implementation, which showed that the problem
lies in Boca's implementation of the PCnet/PCI chip. These test
results can be accessed on Don's www server.
Linux at CESDIS <http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/>
Boca is offering a `warranty repair' for affected owners, which
involves adding one of the missing capacitors, but it appears that
this fix doesn't work 100 percent for most people, although it helps
some.
If you are still thinking of buying one of these cards, then at least
try and get a 7 day unconditional return policy, so that if it doesn't
work properly in your system, you can return it.
More general information on the AMD chips can be found in ``AMD
LANCE''.
More technical information on AMD LANCE based Ethernet cards can be
found in ``Notes on AMD...''.
5.10. Cabletron
Donald writes: `Yes, another one of these companies that won't release
its programming information. They waited for months before actually
confirming that all their information was proprietary, deliberately
wasting my time. Avoid their cards like the plague if you can. Also
note that some people have phoned Cabletron, and have been told things
like `a D. Becker is working on a driver for linux' -- making it sound
like I work for them. This is NOT the case.'
Apparently Cabletron has changed their policy with respect to
programming information (like Xircom) since Donald made the above
comment several years ago -- send e-mail to support@ctron.com if you
want to verify this or ask for programming information. However, at
this point in time, there is little demand for modified/updated
drivers for the older E20xx and E21xx cards.
5.10.1. E10**, E10**-x, E20**, E20**-x
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ne (+8390)
These are NEx000 almost-clones that are reported to work with the
standard NEx000 drivers, thanks to a ctron-specific check during the
probe. If there are any problems, they are unlikely to be fixed, as
the programming information is unavailable.
5.10.2. E2100
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: e2100 (+8390)
Again, there is not much one can do when the programming information
is proprietary. The E2100 is a poor design. Whenever it maps its
shared memory in during a packet transfer, it maps it into the whole
128K region! That means you can't safely use another interrupt-driven
shared memory device in that region, including another E2100. It will
work most of the time, but every once in a while it will bite you.
(Yes, this problem can be avoided by turning off interrupts while
transferring packets, but that will almost certainly lose clock
ticks.) Also, if you mis-program the board, or halt the machine at
just the wrong moment, even the reset button won't bring it back. You
will have to turn it off and leave it off for about 30 seconds.
Media selection is automatic, but you can override this with the low
bits of the dev->mem_end parameter. See ``PARAM_2''. Module users can
specify an xcvr=N value as an option in the /etc/conf.modules file.
Also, don't confuse the E2100 for a NE2100 clone. The E2100 is a
shared memory NatSemi DP8390 design, roughly similar to a brain-
damaged WD8013, whereas the NE2100 (and NE1500) use a bus-mastering
AMD LANCE design.
There is an E2100 driver included in the standard kernel. However,
seeing as programming info isn't available, don't expect bug-fixes.
Don't use one unless you are already stuck with the card.
If you intend on using this driver as a loadable module you should
probably see ``Using the Ethernet Drivers as Modules'' for module
specific information.
5.10.3. E22**
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: lance
According to information in a Cabletron Tech Bulletin, these cards use
the standard AMD PC-Net chipset (see ``AMD PC-Net'') and should work
with the generic lance driver.
5.11. Cogent
Here is where and how to reach them:
Cogent Data Technologies, Inc.
175 West Street, P.O. Box 926
Friday Harbour, WA 98250, USA.
Cogent Sales
15375 S.E. 30th Place, Suite 310
Bellevue, WA 98007, USA.
Technical Support:
Phone (360) 378-2929 between 8am and 5pm PST
Fax (360) 378-2882
Compuserve GO COGENT
Bulletin Board Service (360) 378-5405
Internet: support@cogentdata.com
5.11.1. EM100-ISA/EISA
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: smc9194
These cards use the SMC 91c100 chip and may work with the SMC 91c92
driver, but this has yet to be verified.
5.11.2. Cogent eMASTER+, EM100-PCI, EM400, EM960, EM964
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
These are yet another DEC 21040 implementation that should hopefully
work fine with the standard 21040 driver.
The EM400 and the EM964 are four port cards using a DEC 21050 bridge
and 4 21040 chips.
See ``DEC 21040'' for more information on these cards, and the present
driver situation.
5.12. Compaq
Compaq aren't really in the business of making ethernet cards, but a
lot of their systems have embedded ethernet controllers on the
motherboard.
5.12.1. Compaq Deskpro / Compaq XL (Embedded AMD Chip)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
Machines such as the XL series have an AMD 79c97x PCI chip on the
mainboard that can be used with the standard LANCE driver. But before
you can use it, you have to do some trickery to get the PCI BIOS to a
place where Linux can see it. Frank Maas was kind enough to provide
the details:
`` The problem with this Compaq machine however is that the PCI
directory is loaded in high memory, at a spot where the Linux kernel
can't (won't) reach. Result: the card is never detected nor is it
usable (sideline: the mouse won't work either) The workaround (as
described thoroughly in http://www-c724.uibk.ac.at/XL/) is to load MS-
DOS, launch a little driver Compaq wrote and then load the Linux
kernel using LOADLIN. Ok, I'll give you time to say `yuck, yuck', but
for now this is the only working solution I know of. The little driver
simply moves the PCI directory to a place where it is normally stored
(and where Linux can find it).''
More general information on the AMD chips can be found in ``AMD
LANCE''.
5.12.2. Compaq Nettelligent/NetFlex (Embedded ThunderLAN Chip)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: tlan
These systems use a Texas Instruments ThunderLAN chip Information on
the ThunderLAN driver can be found in ``ThunderLAN''.
5.13. Danpex
5.13.1. Danpex EN9400
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
Yet another card based on the DEC 21040 chip, reported to work fine,
and at a relatively cheap price.
See ``DEC 21040'' for more information on these cards, and the present
driver situation.
5.14. D-Link
5.14.1. DE-100, DE-200, DE-220-T, DE-250
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne (+8390)
Some of the early D-Link cards didn't have the 0x57 PROM signature,
but the ne2000 driver knows about them. For the software configurable
cards, you can get the config program from www.dlink.com. The DE2**
cards were the most widely reported as having the spurious transfer
address mismatch errors with early versions of linux. Note that there
are also cards from Digital (DEC) that are also named DE100 and DE200,
but the similarity stops there.
5.14.2. DE-520
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
This is a PCI card using the PCI version of AMD's LANCE chip. DMA
selection and chip numbering information can be found in ``AMD
LANCE''.
More technical information on AMD LANCE based Ethernet cards can be
found in ``Notes on AMD...''.
5.14.3. DE-528
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne, ne2k-pci (+8390)
Apparently D-Link have also started making PCI NE2000 clones.
5.14.4. DE-530
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
This is a generic DEC 21040 PCI chip implementation, and is reported
to work with the generic 21040 tulip driver.
See ``DEC 21040'' for more information on these cards, and the present
driver situation.
5.14.5. DE-600
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de600
Laptop users and other folk who might want a quick way to put their
computer onto the ethernet may want to use this. The driver is
included with the default kernel source tree. Bjorn Ekwall
bj0rn@blox.se wrote the driver. Expect about 180kb/s transfer speed
from this via the parallel port. You should read the README.DLINK file
in the kernel source tree.
Note that the device name that you pass to ifconfig is now eth0 and
not the previously used dl0.
If your parallel port is not at the standard 0x378 then you will have
to recompile. Bjorn writes: ``Since the DE-620 driver tries to sqeeze
the last microsecond from the loops, I made the irq and port address
constants instead of variables. This makes for a usable speed, but it
also means that you can't change these assignements from e.g. lilo;
you _have_ to recompile...'' Also note that some laptops implement the
on-board parallel port at 0x3bc which is where the parallel ports on
monochrome cards were/are.
5.14.6. DE-620
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de620
Same as the DE-600, only with two output formats. Bjorn has written a
driver for this model, for kernel versions 1.1 and above. See the
above information on the DE-600.
5.14.7. DE-650
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: de650 (?)
Some people have been using this PCMCIA card for some time now with
their notebooks. It is a basic 8390 design, much like a NE2000. The
LinkSys PCMCIA card and the IC-Card Ethernet are supposedly DE-650
clones as well. Note that at present, this driver is not part of the
standard kernel, and so you will have to do some patching.
See ``PCMCIA Support'' in this document, and if you can, have a look
at:
Don's PCMCIA Stuff <http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/pcmcia.html>
5.15. DFI
5.15.1. DFINET-300 and DFINET-400
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne (+8390)
These cards are now detected (as of 0.99pl15) thanks to Eberhard
Moenkeberg emoenke@gwdg.de who noted that they use `DFI' in the first
3 bytes of the prom, instead of using 0x57 in bytes 14 and 15, which
is what all the NE1000 and NE2000 cards use. (The 300 is an 8 bit
pseudo NE1000 clone, and the 400 is a pseudo NE2000 clone.)
5.16. Digital / DEC
5.16.1. DEPCA, DE100/1, DE200/1/2, DE210, DE422
Status: Supported, Driver Name: depca
There is documentation included in the source file `depca.c', which
includes info on how to use more than one of these cards in a machine.
Note that the DE422 is an EISA card. These cards are all based on the
AMD LANCE chip. See ``AMD LANCE'' for more info. A maximum of two of
the ISA cards can be used, because they can only be set for 0x300 and
0x200 base I/O address. If you are intending to do this, please read
the notes in the driver source file depca.c in the standard kernel
source tree.
This driver will also work on Alpha CPU based machines, and there are
various ioctl()s that the user can play with.
5.16.2. Digital EtherWorks 3 (DE203, DE204, DE205)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ewrk3
These cards use a proprietary chip from DEC, as opposed to the LANCE
chip used in the earlier cards like the DE200. These cards support
both shared memory or programmed I/O, although you take about a
50%performance hit if you use PIO mode. The shared memory size can be
set to 2kB, 32kB or 64kB, but only 2 and 32 have been tested with this
driver. David says that the performance is virtually identical between
the 2kB and 32kB mode. There is more information (including using the
driver as a loadable module) at the top of the driver file ewrk3.c and
also in README.ewrk3. Both of these files come with the standard
kernel distribution. This driver has Alpha CPU support like depca.c
does.
The standard driver has a number of interesting ioctl() calls that can
be used to get or clear packet statistics, read/write the EEPROM,
change the hardware address, and the like. Hackers can see the source
code for more info on that one.
David has also written a configuration utility for this card (along
the lines of the DOS program NICSETUP.EXE) along with other tools.
These can be found on most Linux FTP sites in the directory
/pub/Linux/system/Network/management -- look for the file ewrk3tools-
X.XX.tar.gz.
5.16.3. DE425 EISA, DE434, DE435, DE500
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
These cards are based on the 21040 chip mentioned below. The DE500
uses the 21140 chip to provide 10/100Mbs ethernet connections. Have a
read of the 21040 section below for extra info. There are also some
compile-time options available for non-DEC cards using this driver.
Have a look at README.de4x5 for details.
All the Digital cards will autoprobe for their media (except,
temporarily, the DE500 due to a patent issue).
This driver is also Alpha CPU ready and supports being loaded as a
module. Users can access the driver internals through ioctl() calls -
see the 'ewrk3' tools and the de4x5.c sources for information about
how to do this.
5.16.4. DEC 21040, 21041, 2114x, Tulip
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
The DEC 21040 is a bus-mastering single chip ethernet solution from
Digital, similar to AMD's PCnet chip. The 21040 is specifically
designed for the PCI bus architecture. SMC's new EtherPower PCI card
uses this chip.
You have a choice of two drivers for cards based on this chip. There
is the DE425 driver discussed above, and the generic 21040 `tulip'
driver.
Warning: Even though your card may be based upon this chip, the
drivers may not work for you. David C. Davies writes:
``There are no guarantees that either `tulip.c' OR `de4x5.c' will run
any DC2114x based card other than those they've been written to
support. WHY?? You ask. Because there is a register, the General
Purpose Register (CSR12) that (1) in the DC21140A is programmable by
each vendor and they all do it differently (2) in the DC21142/3 this
is now an SIA control register (a la DC21041). The only small ray of
hope is that we can decode the SROM to help set up the driver.
However, this is not a guaranteed solution since some vendors (e.g.
SMC 9332 card) don't follow the Digital Semiconductor recommended SROM
programming format."
In non-technical terms, this means that if you aren't sure that an
unknown card with a DC2114x chip will work with the linux driver(s),
then make sure you can return the card to the place of purchase before
you pay for it.
The updated 21041 chip is also found in place of the 21040 on most of
the later SMC EtherPower cards. The 21140 is for supporting 100Base-?
and works with the Linux drivers for the 21040 chip. To use David's
de4x5 driver with non-DEC cards, have a look at README.de4x5 for
details.
Donald has used SMC EtherPower-10/100 cards to develop the `tulip'
driver. Note that the driver that is in the standard kernel tree at
the moment is not the most up to date version. If you are having
trouble with this driver, you should get the newest version from
Donald's ftp/WWW site.
Tulip Driver <http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/tulip.html>
The above URL also contains a (non-exhaustive) list of various
cards/vendors that use the 21040 chip.
Also note that the tulip driver is still considered an alpha driver
(see ``Alpha Drivers'') at the moment, and should be treated as such.
To use it, you will have to edit arch/i386/config.in and uncomment the
line for CONFIG_DEC_ELCP support.
Donald has even set up a mailing list for tulip driver support
announcements, etc. To join it just type:
echo subscribe | /bin/mail linux-tulip-request@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov
5.17. Farallon
Farallon sells EtherWave adaptors and transceivers. This device allows
multiple 10baseT devices to be daisy-chained.
5.17.1. Farallon Etherwave
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c509
This is reported to be a 3c509 clone that includes the EtherWave
transceiver. People have used these successfully with Linux and the
present 3c509 driver. They are too expensive for general use, but are
a great option for special cases. Hublet prices start at $125, and
Etherwave adds $75-$100 to the price of the board -- worth it if you
have pulled one wire too few, but not if you are two network drops
short.
5.18. Fujitsu
Unlike many network chip manufacturers, Fujitsu have also made and
sold some network cards based upon their chip.
5.18.1. Fujitsu FMV-181/182/183/184
Status: Supported, Driver Name: fmv18x
According to the driver, these cards are a straight forward Fujitsu
MB86965 implementation, which would make them very similar to the
Allied Telesis AT1700 cards.
5.19. Hewlett Packard
The 272** cards use programmed I/O, similar to the NE*000 boards, but
the data transfer port can be `turned off' when you aren't accessing
it, avoiding problems with autoprobing drivers.
Thanks to Glenn Talbott for helping clean up the confusion in this
section regarding the version numbers of the HP hardware.
5.19.1. 27245A
Status: Supported, Driver Name: hp (+8390)
8 Bit 8390 based 10BaseT, not recommended for all the 8 bit reasons.
It was re-designed a couple years ago to be highly integrated which
caused some changes in initialization timing which only affected
testing programs, not LAN drivers. (The new card is not `ready' as
soon after switching into and out of loopback mode.)
If you intend on using this driver as a loadable module you should
probably see ``Using the Ethernet Drivers as Modules'' for module
specific information.
5.19.2. HP EtherTwist, PC Lan+ (27247, 27252A)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: hp+ (+8390)
The HP PC Lan+ is different to the standard HP PC Lan card. This
driver was added to the list of drivers in the standard kernel during
the v1.1.x development cycle. It can be operated in either a PIO mode
like a ne2000, or a shared memory mode like a wd8013.
The 47B is a 16 Bit 8390 based 10BaseT w/AUI, and the 52A is a 16 Bit
8390 based ThinLAN w/AUI. These cards have 32K onboard RAM for Tx/Rx
packet buffering instead of the usual 16KB, and they both offer LAN
connector autosense.
If you intend on using this driver as a loadable module you should
probably see ``Using the Ethernet Drivers as Modules'' for module
specific information.
5.19.3. HP-J2405A
Status: Supported, Driver Name: lance
These are lower priced, and slightly faster than the 27247/27252A, but
are missing some features, such as AUI, ThinLAN connectivity, and boot
PROM socket. This is a fairly generic LANCE design, but a minor
design decision makes it incompatible with a generic `NE2100' driver.
Special support for it (including reading the DMA channel from the
board) is included thanks to information provided by HP's Glenn
Talbott.
More technical information on LANCE based cards can be found in
``Notes on AMD...''
5.19.4. HP-Vectra On Board Ethernet
Status: Supported, Driver Name: lance
The HP-Vectra has an AMD PCnet chip on the motherboard. DMA selection
and chip numbering information can be found in ``AMD LANCE''.
More technical information on LANCE based cards can be found in
``Notes on AMD...''
5.19.5. HP 10/100 VG Any Lan Cards (27248B, J2573, J2577, J2585,
J970, J973)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: hp100
This driver also supports some of the Compex VG products. Since the
driver supports ISA, EISA and PCI cards, it is found under ISA cards
when running make config on a kernel source.
5.19.6. HP NetServer 10/100TX PCI (D5013A)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: eepro100
Apparently these are just a rebadged Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100B
card. See the Intel section for more information.
5.20. IBM / International Business Machines
5.20.1. IBM Thinkpad 300
Status: Supported, Driver Name: znet
This is compatible with the Intel based Zenith Z-note. See ``Z-note''
for more info.
Supposedly this site has a comprehensive database of useful stuff for
newer versions of the Thinkpad. I haven't checked it out myself yet.
Thinkpad-info <http://peipa.essex.ac.uk/html/linux-thinkpad.html>
For those without a WWW browser handy, try
peipa.essex.ac.uk:/pub/tp750/
5.20.2. IBM Credit Card Adaptor for Ethernet
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ? (distributed separately)
People have been using this PCMCIA card with Linux as well. Similar
points apply, those being that you need a supported PCMCIA chipset on
your notebook, and that you will have to patch the PCMCIA support into
the standard kernel.
See ``PCMCIA Support'' in this document, and if you can, have a look
at:
Don's PCMCIA Stuff <http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/pcmcia.html>
5.20.3. IBM Token Ring
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ibmtr
To support token ring requires more than only writing a device driver,
it also requires writing the source routing routines for token ring.
It is the source routing that would be the most time comsuming to
write.
Peter De Schrijver has been spending some time on Token Ring lately.
and has worked with IBM ISA and MCA token ring cards.
The present token ring code has been included into the first of the
1.3.x series kernels.
Peter says that it was originally tested on an MCA 16/4 Megabit Token
Ring board, but it should work with other Tropic based boards.
5.21. ICL Ethernet Cards
5.21.1. ICL EtherTeam 16i/32
Status: Supported, Driver Name: eth16i
Mika Kuoppala (miku@pupu.elt.icl.fi) wrote this driver, and it was
included into early 1.3.4x kernels. It uses the Fujitsu MB86965 chip
that is also used on the at1700 cards.
5.22. Intel Ethernet Cards
Note that the naming of the various Intel cards is ambiguous and
confusing at best. If in doubt, then check the i8xxxx number on the
main chip on the card or for PCI cards, use the PCI information in the
/proc directory and then compare that to the numbers listed here.
5.22.1. Ether Express
Status: Supported, Driver Name: eexpress
This card uses the intel i82586. Earlier versions of this driver (in
v1.2 kernels) were classed as alpha-test, as it didn't work well for
most people. The driver in the v2.0 kernel seems to work much better
for those who have tried it, although the driver source still lists it
as experimental and more problematic on faster machines.
The comments at the top of the driver source list some of the problems
(and fixes!) associated with these cards. The slowdown hack of
replacing all the outb with outb_p in the driver has been reported to
avoid lockups for at least one user.
5.22.2. Ether Express PRO/10
Status: Supported, Driver Name: eepro
Bao Chau Ha has written a driver for these cards that has been
included into early 1.3.x kernels. It may also work with some of the
Compaq built-in ethernet systems that are based on the i82595 chip.
5.22.3. Ether Express PRO/10 PCI (EISA)
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ? (distributed separately)
John Stalba (stalba@ultranet.com) has written a driver for the PCI
version. These cards use the PLX9036 PCI interface chip with the Intel
i82596 LAN controller chip. If your card has the i82557 chip, then you
don't have this card, but rather the version discussed next, and hence
want the EEPro100 driver instead.
You can get the alpha driver for the PRO/10 PCI card, along with
instructions on how to use it at:
EEPro10 Driver <http://www.ultranet.com/~stalba/eep10pci.html>
If you have the EISA card, you will probably have to hack the driver a
bit to account for the different (PCI vs. EISA) detection mechanisms
that are used in each case.
5.22.4. Ether Express PRO 10/100B
Status: Supported, Driver Name: eepro100
Note that this driver will not work with the older 100A cards. The
chip numbers listed in the driver are i82557/i82558. For driver
updates and/or driver support, have a look at:
EEPro-100B Page
<http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/eepro100.html>
To subscribe to the mailing list relating to this driver, do:
echo subscribe | /bin/mail linux-eepro100-request@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov
Apparently Donald had to sign a non-disclosure agreement that stated
he could actually disclose the driver source code! How is that for
sillyness on intel's part?
5.23. Kingston
Kingston make various cards, including NE2000+, AMD PCnet based cards,
and DEC tulip based cards. Most of these cards should work fine with
their respective driver. See Kingston Web Page
<http://www.kingston.com>
The KNE40 DEC 21041 tulip based card is reported to work fine with the
generic tulip driver.
5.24. LinkSys
LinkSys make a handful of different NE2000 clones, some straight ISA
cards, some ISA plug and play and some even ne2000-PCI clones based on
one of the supported ne2000-PCI chipsets. There are just too many
models to list here.
LinkSys are linux-friendly, with a linux specific WWW support page,
and even have Linux printed on the boxes of some of their products.
Have a look at:
http://www.linksys.com/support/solution/nos/linux.htm
5.24.1. LinkSys Etherfast 10/100 Cards.
Status: Supported, Driver Name: tulip
Note that with these cards there have been several `revisions' (i.e.
different chipset used) all with the same card name. The 1st used the
DEC chipset. The 2nd revision used the Lite-On PNIC 82c168 PCI Network
Interface Controller, and support for this was merged into the
standard tulip driver (as of version 0.83 and newer). More PNIC
information is available at:
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/pnic.html
More information on the various versions of these cards can be found
at the LinkSys WWW site mentioned above.
5.24.2. LinkSys Pocket Ethernet Adapter Plus (PEAEPP)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de620
This is supposedly a DE-620 clone, and is reported to work well with
that driver. See ``DE-620'' for more information.
5.24.3. LinkSys PCMCIA Adaptor
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de650 (?)
This is supposed to be a re-badged DE-650. See ``DE-650'' for more
information.
5.25. Microdyne
5.25.1. Microdyne Exos 205T
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ?
Another i82586 based card. Dirk Niggemann dirk-n@dircon.co.uk has
written a driver that he classes as ``pre-alpha'' that he would like
people to test. Mail him for more details.
5.26. Mylex
Mylex can be reached at the following numbers, in case anyone wants to
ask them anything.
MYLEX CORPORATION, Fremont
Sales: 800-77-MYLEX, (510) 796-6100
FAX: (510) 745-8016.
They also have a web site: Mylex WWW Site <http://www.mylex.com>
5.26.1. Mylex LNE390A, LNE390B
Status: Supported, Driver Name: lne390 (+8390)
These are fairly old EISA cards that make use of a shared memory
implementation similar to the wd80x3. A driver for these cards is
available in the current 2.1.x series of kernels. Ensure you set the
shared memory address below 1MB or above the highest address of the
physical RAM installed in the machine.
5.26.2. Mylex LNP101
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
This is a PCI card that is based on DEC's 21040 chip. It is
selectable between 10BaseT, 10Base2 and 10Base5 output. The LNP101
card has been verified to work with the generic 21040 driver.
See the section on the 21040 chip (``DEC 21040'') for more
information.
5.26.3. Mylex LNP104
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
The LNP104 uses the DEC 21050 chip to deliver four independent 10BaseT
ports. It should work with recent 21040 drivers that know how to share
IRQs, but nobody has reported trying it yet (that I am aware of).
5.27. Novell Ethernet, NExxxx and associated clones.
The prefix `NE' came from Novell Ethernet. Novell followed the
cheapest NatSemi databook design and sold the manufacturing rights
(spun off?) Eagle, just to get reasonably-priced ethercards into the
market. (The now ubiquitous NE2000 card.)
5.27.1. NE1000, NE2000
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne (+8390)
The ne2000 is now a generic name for a bare-bones design around the
NatSemi 8390 chip. They use programmed I/O rather than shared memory,
leading to easier installation but slightly lower performance and a
few problems. Some of the more common problems that arise with NE2000
cards are listed in ``Problems with...''
Some NE2000 clones use the National Semiconductor `AT/LANTic' 83905
chip, which offers a shared memory mode similar to the wd8013 and
EEPROM software configuration. The shared memory mode will offer less
CPU usage (i.e. more efficient) than the programmed I/O mode.
In general it is not a good idea to put a NE2000 clone at I/O address
0x300 because nearly every device driver probes there at boot. Some
poor NE2000 clones don't take kindly to being prodded in the wrong
areas, and will respond by locking your machine. Also 0x320 is bad
because SCSI drivers probe into 0x330.
Donald has written a NE2000 diagnostic program (ne2k.c) for all ne2000
cards. See ``Diagnostic Programs'' for more information.
If you intend on using this driver as a loadable module you should
probably see ``Using the Ethernet Drivers as Modules'' for module
specific information.
5.27.2. NE2000-PCI (RealTek/Winbond/Compex)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne, ne2k-pci (+8390)
Yes, believe it or not, people are making PCI cards based on the more
than ten year old interface design of the ne2000. At the moment nearly
all of these cards are based on the RealTek 8029 chip, or the Winbond
89c940 chip. The Compex, KTI, VIA and Netvin cards apparently also use
these chips, but have a different PCI ID.
The latest v2.0 kernel has support to automatically detect all these
cards and use them. (If you are using a kernel v2.0.34 or older, you
should upgrade to ensure your card will be detected.) There are now
two drivers to choose from; the original ISA/PCI ne.c driver, and a
relatively new PCI-only ne2k-pci.c driver.
To use the original ISA/PCI driver you have to say `Y' to the `Other
ISA cards' option when running make config as you are actually using
the same NE2000 driver as the ISA cards use. (That should also give
you a hint that these cards aren't anywhere as intelligent as say a
PCNet-PCI or DEC 21040 card...)
The newer PCI-only driver differs from the ISA/PCI driver in that all
the support for old NE1000 8 bit cards has been removed and that data
is moved to/from the card in bigger blocks, without any intervening
pauses that the older ISA-NE2000's required for reliable operation.
The result is a driver that is slightly smaller and slightly more
efficient, but don't get too excited as the difference will not be
obvious under normal use. (If you really wanted maximum
efficiency/low CPU use, then a PCI-NE2000 is simply a very poor
choice.) Driver updates and more information can be found at:
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/ne2k-pci.html
If you have a NE2000 PCI card that is not detected by the most
current version of the driver, please contact the maintainer of the
NE2000 driver as listed in /usr/src/linux/MAINTAINERS along with the
output from a cat /proc/pci and dmesg so that support for your card
can also be added to the driver.
Also note that various card makers have been known to put `NE2000
Compatible' stickers on their product boxes even when it is completely
different (e.g. PCNet-PCI or RealTek 8139). If in doubt check the
main chip number against this document.
5.27.3. NE-10/100
Status: Not Supported.
These are ISA 100Mbps cards based on the National Semiconductor
DP83800 and DP83840 chips. There is currently no driver support, nor
has anyone reported that they are working on a driver. Apparently
documentation on the chip is unavailable with the exception of a
single PDF file that doesn't give enough details for a driver.
5.27.4. NE1500, NE2100
Status: Supported, Driver Name: lance
These cards use the original 7990 LANCE chip from AMD and are
supported using the Linux lance driver. Newer NE2100 clones use the
updated PCnet/ISA chip from AMD.
Some earlier versions of the lance driver had problems with getting
the IRQ line via autoIRQ from the original Novell/Eagle 7990 cards.
Hopefully this is now fixed. If not, then specify the IRQ via LILO,
and let us know that it still has problems.
DMA selection and chip numbering information can be found in ``AMD
LANCE''.
More technical information on LANCE based cards can be found in
``Notes on AMD...''
5.27.5. NE/2 MCA
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ne2
There were a few NE2000 microchannel cards made by various companies.
This driver, available in v2.2 kernels, will detect the following MCA
cards: Novell Ethernet Adapter NE/2, Compex ENET-16 MC/P, and the Arco
Ethernet Adapter AE/2.
5.27.6. NE3200
Status: Not Supported.
This old EISA card uses a 8MHz 80186 in conjunction with an i82586.
Nobody is working on a driver for it, as there is no information
available on the card, and no real demand for a driver either.
5.27.7. NE3210
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne3210 (+8390)
This EISA card is completely different from the NE3200, as it uses a
Nat Semi 8390 chip. The driver can be found in the v2.2 kernel source
tree. Ensure you set the shared memory address below 1MB or above the
highest address of the physical RAM installed in the machine.
5.27.8. NE5500
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
These are just AMD PCnet-PCI cards ('970A) chips. More information on
LANCE/PCnet based cards can be found in ``AMD LANCE''.
5.28. Proteon
5.28.1. Proteon P1370-EA
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne (+8390)
Apparently this is a NE2000 clone, and works fine with Linux.
5.28.2. Proteon P1670-EA
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
This is yet another PCI card that is based on DEC's Tulip chip. It
has been reported to work fine with Linux.
See the section on the 21040 chip (``DEC 21040'') for more driver
information.
5.29. Pure Data
5.29.1. PDUC8028, PDI8023
Status: Supported, Driver Name: wd (+8390)
The PureData PDUC8028 and PDI8023 series of cards are reported to
work, thanks to special probe code contributed by Mike Jagdis
jaggy@purplet.demon.co.uk. The support is integrated with the WD
driver.
5.30. Racal-Interlan
Racal Interlan can be reached via WWW at www.interlan.com. I believe
they were also known as MiCom-Interlan at one point in the past.
5.30.1. ES3210
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: es3210
This is an EISA 8390 based shared memory card. An experimetal driver
is shipped with v2.2 kernels and it is reported to work fine, but the
EISA IRQ and shared memory address detection appears not to work with
(at least) the early revision cards. (This problem is not unique to
the Linux world either...) In that case, you have to supply them to
the driver. For example, card at IRQ 5 and shared memory 0xd0000,
with a modular driver, add options es3210 irq=5 mem=0xd0000 to
/etc/conf.modules. Or with the driver compiled into the kernel,
supply at boot ether=5,0,0xd0000,eth0 The I/O base is automatically
detected and hence a value of zero should be used.
5.30.2. NI5010
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ni5010
You used to have to go get the driver for these old 8 bit MiCom-
Interlan cards separately, but now it is shipped with the v2.2 kernels
as an experimental driver.
5.30.3. NI5210
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ni52
This card also uses one of the Intel chips. Michael Hipp has written
a driver for this card. It is included in the standard kernel as an
`alpha' driver. Michael would like to hear feedback from users that
have this card. See ``Alpha Drivers'' for important information on
using alpha-test ethernet drivers with Linux.
5.30.4. NI6510 (not EB)
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ni65
There is also a driver for the LANCE based NI6510, and it is also
written by Michael Hipp. Again, it is also an `alpha' driver. For some
reason, this card is not compatible with the generic LANCE driver. See
``Alpha Drivers'' for important information on using alpha-test
ethernet drivers with Linux.
5.30.5. EtherBlaster (aka NI6510EB)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: lance
As of kernel 1.3.23, the generic LANCE driver had a check added to it
for the 0x52, 0x44 NI6510EB specific signature. Others have reported
that this signature is not the same for all NI6510EB cards however,
which will cause the lance driver to not detect your card. If this
happens to you, you can change the probe (at about line 322 in
lance.c) to printk() out what the values are for your card and then
use them instead of the 0x52, 0x44 defaults.
The cards should probably be run in `high-performance' mode and not in
the NI6510 compatible mode when using the lance driver.
5.31. RealTek
5.31.1. RealTek RTL8002/8012 (AT-Lan-Tec) Pocket adaptor
Status: Supported, Driver Name: atp
This is a generic, low-cost OEM pocket adaptor being sold by AT-Lan-
Tec, and (likely) a number of other suppliers. A driver for it is
included in the standard kernel. Note that there is substantial
information contained in the driver source file `atp.c'.
Note that the device name that you pass to ifconfig was not eth0 but
atp0 for earlier versions of this driver.
5.31.2. RealTek 8009
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne (+8390)
This is an ISA NE2000 clone, and is reported to work fine with the
linux NE2000 driver. The rset8009.exe program can be obtained from
RealTek's WWW site at http://www.realtek.com.tw - or via ftp from the
same site.
5.31.3. RealTek 8019
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne (+8390)
This is a Plug and Pray version of the above. Use the DOS software to
disable PnP and enable jumperless configuration; set the card to a
sensible I/O address and IRQ and you should be ready to go. (If using
the driver as a module, don't forget to add an io=0xNNN option to
/etc/conf.modules). The rset8019.exe program can be obtained from
RealTek's WWW site at http://www.realtek.com.tw - or via ftp from the
same site.
5.31.4. RealTek 8029
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne, ne2k-pci (+8390)
This is a PCI single chip implementation of a NE2000 clone. Various
vendors are now selling cards with this chip. See ``NE2000-PCI'' for
information on using any of these cards. Note that this is still a
10+ year old design just glued onto a PCI bus. Performance won't be
staggeringly better than the equivalent ISA model.
5.31.5. RealTek 8129/8139
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: rtl8139
Another PCI single chip ethernet solution from RealTek. A driver for
cards based upon this chip was included in the v2.0.34 release of
linux. You currently have to answer `Y' when asked if you want
experimental drivers for v2.2 kernels to get access to this driver.
For more information, see:
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/rtl8139.html
5.32. Sager
5.32.1. Sager NP943
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: 3c501
This is just a 3c501 clone, with a different S.A. PROM prefix. I
assume it is equally as brain dead as the original 3c501 as well. The
driver checks for the NP943 I.D. and then just treats it as a 3c501
after that. See ``3Com 3c501'' for all the reasons as to why you
really don't want to use one of these cards.
5.33. Schneider & Koch
5.33.1. SK G16
Status: Supported, Driver Name: sk_g16
This driver was included into the v1.1 kernels, and it was written by
PJD Weichmann and SWS Bern. It appears that the SK G16 is similar to
the NI6510, in that it is based on the first edition LANCE chip (the
7990). Once again, it appears as though this card won't work with the
generic LANCE driver.
5.34. SEEQ
5.34.1. SEEQ 8005
Status: Supported, Driver Name: seeq8005
This driver was included into early 1.3.x kernels, and was written by
Hamish Coleman. There is little information about the card included
in the driver, and hence little information to be put here. If you
have a question, you are probably best off e-mailing
hamish@zot.apana.org.au
5.35. SMC (Standard Microsystems Corp.)
The ethernet part of Western Digital was bought out by SMC many years
ago when the wd8003 and wd8013 were the main product. Since then SMC
has continued making 8390 based ISA cards (Elite16, Ultra, EtherEZ)
and also added several PCI products to their range.
Contact information for SMC:
SMC / Standard Microsystems Corp., 80 Arkay Drive, Hauppage, New York,
11788, USA. Technical Support via phone: 800-992-4762 (USA) or
800-433-5345 (Canada) or 516-435-6250 (Other Countries). Literature
requests: 800-SMC-4-YOU (USA) or 800-833-4-SMC (Canada) or
516-435-6255 (Other Countries). Technical Support via E-mail:
techsupt@ccmail.west.smc.com. FTP Site: ftp.smc.com. WWW Site: SMC
<http://www.smc.com>.
5.35.1. WD8003, SMC Elite
Status: Supported, Driver Name: wd (+8390)
These are the 8-bit versions of the card. The 8 bit 8003 is slightly
less expensive, but only worth the savings for light use. Note that
some of the non-EEPROM cards (clones with jumpers, or old old old
wd8003 cards) have no way of reporting the IRQ line used. In this
case, auto-irq is used, and if that fails, the driver silently assings
IRQ 5. You can get the SMC setup/driver disks from SMC's ftp site.
Note that some of the newer SMC `SuperDisk' programs will fail to
detect the real old EEPROM-less cards. The file SMCDSK46.EXE seems to
be a good all-round choice. Also the jumper settings for all their
cards are in an ASCII text file in the aforementioned archive. The
latest (greatest?) version can be obtained from ftp.smc.com.
As these are basically the same as their 16 bit counterparts (WD8013 /
SMC Elite16), you should see the next section for more information.
5.35.2. WD8013, SMC Elite16
Status: Supported, Driver Name: wd (+8390)
Over the years the design has added more registers and an EEPROM. (The
first wd8003 cards appeared about ten years ago!) Clones usually go
by the `8013' name, and usually use a non-EEPROM (jumpered) design.
Late model SMC cards will have the SMC 83c690 chip instead of the
original Nat Semi DP8390 found on earlier cards. The shared memory
design makes the cards a bit faster than PIO cards, especially with
larger packets. More importantly, from the driver's point of view, it
avoids a few bugs in the programmed-I/O mode of the 8390, allows safe
multi-threaded access to the packet buffer, and it doesn't have a
programmed-I/O data register that hangs your machine during warm-boot
probes.
Non-EEPROM cards that can't just read the selected IRQ will attempt
auto-irq, and if that fails, they will silently assign IRQ 10. (8 bit
versions will assign IRQ 5)
Cards with a non standard amount of memory on board can have the
memory size specified at boot (or as an option in /etc/conf.modules if
using modules). The standard memory size is 8kB for an 8bit card and
16kB for a 16bit card. For example, the older WD8003EBT cards could
be jumpered for 32kB memory. To make full use of that RAM, you would
use something like (for I/O=0x280 and IRQ 9):
______________________________________________________________________
LILO: linux ether=9,0x280,0xd0000,0xd8000,eth0
______________________________________________________________________
Also see ``8013 problems'' for some of the more common problems and
frequently asked questions that pop up often.
If you intend on using this driver as a loadable module you should
probably see ``Using the Ethernet Drivers as Modules'' for module
specific information.
5.35.3. SMC Elite Ultra
Status: Supported, Driver Name: smc-ultra (+8390)
This ethercard is based on the 83c790 chip from SMC, which has a few
new features over the 83c690. While it has a mode that is similar to
the older SMC ethercards, it's not entirely compatible with the old
WD80*3 drivers. However, in this mode it shares most of its code with
the other 8390 drivers, while operating slightly faster than a WD8013
clone.
Since part of the Ultra looks like an 8013, the Ultra probe is
supposed to find an Ultra before the wd8013 probe has a chance to
mistakenly identify it.
Donald mentioned that it is possible to write a separate driver for
the Ultra's `Altego' mode which allows chaining transmits at the cost
of inefficient use of receive buffers, but that will probably not
happen.
Bus-Master SCSI host adaptor users take note: In the manual that ships
with Interactive UNIX, it mentions that a bug in the SMC Ultra will
cause data corruption with SCSI disks being run from an aha-154X host
adaptor. This will probably bite aha-154X compatible cards, such as
the BusLogic boards, and the AMI-FastDisk SCSI host adaptors as well.
SMC has acknowledged the problem occurs with Interactive, and older
Windows NT drivers. It is a hardware conflict with early revisions of
the card that can be worked around in the driver design. The current
Ultra driver protects against this by only enabling the shared memory
during data transfers with the card. Make sure your kernel version is
at least 1.1.84, or that the driver version reported at boot is at
least smc-ultra.c:v1.12 otherwise you are vulnerable.
If you intend on using this driver as a loadable module you should
probably see ``Using the Ethernet Drivers as Modules'' for module
specific information.
5.35.4. SMC Elite Ultra32 EISA
Status: Supported, Driver Name: smc-ultra32 (+8390)
This EISA card shares a lot in common with its ISA counterpart. A
working (and stable) driver is included in both v2.0 and v2.2 kernels.
Thanks go to Leonard Zubkoff for purchasing some of these cards so
that linux support could be added for them.
5.35.5. SMC EtherEZ (8416)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: smc-ultra (+8390)
This card uses SMC's 83c795 chip and supports the Plug 'n Play
specification. It also has an SMC Ultra compatible mode, which allows
it to be used with the Linux Ultra driver. For best results, use the
SMC supplied program (avail. from their www/ftp site) to disable PnP
and configure it for shared memory mode. See the above information
for notes on the Ultra driver.
For v1.2 kernels, the card had to be configured for shared memory
operation. However v2.0 kernels can use the card in shared memory or
programmed I/O mode. Shared memory mode will be slightly faster, and
use less CPU resources as well.
5.35.6. SMC EtherPower PCI (8432)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
NB: The EtherPower II is an entirely different card. See below! These
cards are a basic DEC 21040 implementation, i.e. one big chip and a
couple of transceivers. Donald has used one of these cards for his
development of the generic 21040 driver (aka tulip.c). Thanks to Duke
Kamstra, once again, for supplying a card to do development on.
Some of the later revisons of this card use the newer DEC 21041 chip,
which may cause problems with older versions of the tulip driver. If
you have problems, make sure you are using the latest driver release,
which may not yet be included in the current kernel source tree.
See ``DEC 21040'' for more details on using one of these cards, and
the current status of the driver.
Apparently, the latest revision of the card, the EtherPower-II uses
the 9432 chip. It is unclear at the moment if this one will work with
the present driver. As always, if unsure, check that you can return
the card if it doesn't work with the linux driver before paying for
the card.
5.35.7. SMC EtherPower II PCI (9432)
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: epic100
These cards, based upon the SMC 83c170 chip, are entirely different
than the Tulip based cards. A new driver has been included in kernels
v2.0 and v2.2 to support these cards. For more details, see:
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/epic100.html
5.35.8. SMC 3008
Status: Not Supported.
These 8 bit cards are based on the Fujitsu MB86950, which is an
ancient version of the MB86965 used in the Linux at1700 driver. Russ
says that you could probably hack up a driver by looking at the
at1700.c code and his DOS packet driver for the Tiara card
(tiara.asm). They are not very common.
5.35.9. SMC 3016
Status: Not Supported.
These are 16bit I/O mapped 8390 cards, much similar to a generic
NE2000 card. If you can get the specifications from SMC, then porting
the NE2000 driver would probably be quite easy. They are not very
common.
5.35.10. SMC-9000 / SMC 91c92/4
Status: Supported, Driver Name: smc9194
The SMC9000 is a VLB card based on the 91c92 chip. The 91c92 appears
on a few other brand cards as well, but is fairly uncommon. Erik
Stahlman (erik@vt.edu) has written this driver which is in v2.0
kernels, but not in the older v1.2 kernels. You may be able to drop
the driver into a v1.2 kernel source tree with minimal difficulty.
5.35.11. SMC 91c100
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: smc9194
The SMC 91c92 driver is supposed to work for cards based on this
100Base-T chip, but at the moment this is unverified.
5.36. Texas Instruments
5.36.1. ThunderLAN
Status: Supported, Driver Name: tlan
This driver covers many Compaq built-in ethernet devices, including
the NetFlex and Netelligent groups. It also supports the Olicom 2183,
2185, 2325 and 2326 products.
5.37. Thomas Conrad
5.37.1. Thomas Conrad TC-5048
This is yet another PCI card that is based on DEC's 21040 chip.
See the section on the 21040 chip (``DEC 21040'') for more
information.
5.38. VIA
You probably won't see a VIA networking card, as VIA make several
networking chips that are then used by others in the construction of
an ethernet card. They have a WWW site at:
http://www.via.com.tw/
5.38.1. VIA 86C926 Amazon
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne, ne2k-pci (+8390)
This controller chip is VIA's PCI-NE2000 offering. You can choose
between the ISA/PCI ne.c driver or the PCI-only ne2k-pci.c driver. See
the PCI-NE2000 section for more details.
5.38.2. VIA 86C100A Rhine II (and 3043 Rhine I)
Status Supported, Driver Name: via-rhine
This relatively new driver can be found in current 2.0 and 2.1
kernels. It is an improvement over the 86C926 NE2000 chip in that it
supports bus master transfers, but strict 32 bit buffer alignment
requirements limit the benefit gained from this. For more details and
driver updates, see:
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/via-rhine.html
5.39. Western Digital
Please see ``SMC'' for information on SMC cards. (SMC bought out
Western Digital's network card section many years ago.)
5.40. Winbond
Winbond don't really make and sell complete cards to the general
public -- instead they make single chip ethernet solutions that other
companies buy, stick onto a PCI board with their own name and then
sell through retail stores.
5.40.1. Winbond 89c840
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: winbond-840
This driver isn't currently shipped with the kernel, as it is in the
testing phase. It is available at:
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/test/winbond-840.c
5.40.2. Winbond 89c940
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne, ne2k-pci (+8390)
This chip is one of the two commonly found on the low price PCI ne2000
cards sold by lots of manufacturers. Note that this is still a 10+
year old design just glued onto a PCI bus. Performance won't be
staggeringly better than the equivalent ISA model.
5.41. Xircom
For the longest time, Xircom wouldn't release the programming
information required to write a driver, unless you signed your life
away. Apparently enough linux users have pestered them for driver
support (they claim to support all popular networking operating
systems...) so that they have changed their policy to allow
documentation to be released without having to sign a non-disclosure
agreement. Some people have said they they will release the source
code to the SCO driver, while others have been told that they are no
longer providing information on `obsolete' products like the earlier
PE models. If you are interested and want to check into this
yourself, you can reach Xircom at 1-800-874-7875, 1-800-438-4526 or
+1-818-878-7600.
5.41.1. Xircom PE1, PE2, PE3-10B*
Status: Not Supported.
Not to get your hopes up, but if you have one of these parallel port
adaptors, you may be able to use it in the DOS emulator with the
Xircom-supplied DOS drivers. You will have to allow DOSEMU access to
your parallel port, and will probably have to play with SIG (DOSEMU's
Silly Interrupt Generator).
5.41.2. Xircom PCMCIA Cards
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ????
Some of the Xircom PCMCIA card(s) have drivers that are available with
David Hinds PCMCIA package. Check there for the most up to date
indformation
5.42. Zenith
5.42.1. Z-Note
Status: Supported, Driver Name: znet
The built-in Z-Note network adaptor is based on the Intel i82593 using
two DMA channels. There is an (alpha?) driver available in the present
kernel version. As with all notebook and pocket adaptors, it is under
the `Pocket and portable adaptors' section when running make config.
Also note that the IBM ThinkPad 300 is compatible with the Z-Note.
5.43. Znyx
5.43.1. Znyx ZX342 (DEC 21040 based)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
You have a choice of two drivers for cards based on this chip. There
is the DE425 driver written by David, and the generic 21040 driver
that Donald has written.
Note that as of 1.1.91, David has added a compile time option that may
allow non-DEC cards (such as the Znyx cards) to work with this driver.
Have a look at README.de4x5 for details.
See ``DEC 21040'' for more information on these cards, and the present
driver situation.
5.44. Identifying an Unknown Card
Okay, so your uncle's cousin's neighbour's friend had a brother who
found an old ISA ethernet card in the AT case he was using as a cage
for his son's pet hampster. Somehow you ended up with the card and
want to try and use it with linux, but nobody has a clue what the card
is and there isn't any documentation.
First of all, look for any obvious model numbers that might give a
clue. Any model number that contains 2000 will most likely be a NE2000
clone. Any cards with 8003 or 8013 on them somewhere will be
Western/Digital WD80x3 cards or SMC Elite cards or clones of them.
5.44.1. Identifying the Network Interface Controller
Look for the biggest chip on the card. This will be the network
controller (NIC) itself, and most can be identified by the part
number. If you know which NIC is on the card, the following might be
able to help you figure out what card it is.
Probably still the most common NIC is the National Semiconductor
DP8390 aka NS32490 aka DP83901 aka DP83902 aka DP83905 aka DP83907.
And those are just the ones made by National! Other companies such as
Winbond and UMC make DP8390 and DP83905 clone parts, such as the
Winbond 89c904 (DP83905 clone) and the UMC 9090. If the card has some
form of 8390 on it, then chances are it is a ne1000 or ne2000 clone
card. The second most common 8390 based card are wd80x3 cards and
clones. Cards with a DP83905 can be configured to be an ne2000 or a
wd8013. Never versions of the genuine wd80x3 and SMC Elite cards have
an 83c690 in place of the original DP8390. The SMC Ultra cards have an
83c790, and use a slightly different driver than the wd80x3 cards.
The SMC EtherEZ cards have an 83c795, and use the same driver as the
SMC Ultra. All BNC cards based on some sort of 8390 or 8390 clone will
usually have an 8392 (or 83c692, or ???392) 16 pin DIP chip very close
to the BNC connector.
Another common NIC found on older cards is the Intel i82586. Cards
having this NIC include the 3c505, 3c507, 3c523, Intel EtherExpress-
ISA, Microdyne Exos-205T, and the Racal-Interlan NI5210.
The original AMD LANCE NIC was numbered AM7990, and newer revisions
include the 79c960, 79c961, 79c965, 79c970, and 79c974. Most cards
with one of the above will work with the Linux LANCE driver, with the
exception of the old Racal-Interlan NI6510 cards that have their own
driver.
Newer PCI cards having a DEC 21040, 21041, 21140, or similar number on
the NIC should be able to use the linux tulip or de4x5 driver.
Other PCI cards having a big chip marked RTL8029 or 89C940 or 86C926
are ne2000 clone cards, and the ne driver in linux version v2.0 and up
should automatically detect these cards at boot.
5.44.2. Identifying the Ethernet Address
Each ethernet card has its own six byte address that is unique to that
card. The first three bytes of that address are the same for each card
made by that particular manufacturer. For example all SMC cards start
with 00:00:c0. The last three are assigned by the manufacturer
uniquely to each individual card as they are produced.
If your card has a sticker on it giving all six bits of its address,
you can look up the vendor from the first three. However it is more
common to see only the last three bytes printed onto a sticker
attached to a socketed PROM, which tells you nothing.
You can determine which vendors have which assigned addresses from
RFC-1340. Apparently there is a more up to date listing available in
various places as well. Try a WWW or FTP search for EtherNet-codes or
Ethernet-codes and you will find something.
5.44.3. Tips on Trying to Use an Unknown Card
If you are still not sure what the card is, but have at least narrowed
it down some, then you can build a kernel with a whole bunch of
drivers included, and see if any of them autodetect the card at boot.
If the kernel doesn't detect the card, it may be that the card is not
configured to one of the addresses that the driver probes when looking
for a card. In this case, you might want to try getting
scanport.tar.gz from your local linux ftp site, and see if that can
locate where your card is jumpered for. It scans ISA I/O space from
0x100 to 0x3ff looking for devices that aren't registered in
/proc/ioports. If it finds an unknown device starting at some
particular address, you can then explicity point the ethernet probes
at that address with an ether= boot argument.
If you manage to get the card detected, you can then usually figure
out the unknown jumpers by changing them one at a time and seeing at
what I/O base and IRQ that the card is detected at. The IRQ settings
can also usually be determined by following the traces on the back of
the card to where the jumpers are soldered through. Counting the `gold
fingers' on the backside, from the end of the card with the metal
bracket, you have IRQ 9, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 10, 11, 12, 15, 14 at fingers
4, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38 respectively. Eight bit
cards only have up to finger 31.
Jumpers that appear to do nothing usually are for selecting the memory
address of an optional boot ROM. Other jumpers that are located near
the BNC or RJ-45 or AUI connectors are usually to select the output
media. These are also typically near the `black box' voltage
converters marked YCL, Valor, or Fil-Mag.
A nice collection of jumper settings for various cards can be found at
the following URL:
Ethercard Settings <http://www.slug.org.au/NIC/>
5.45. Drivers for Non-Ethernet Devices
There are a few other drivers that are in the linux source that
present an ethernet-like device to network programs, while not really
being ethernet. These are briefly listed here for completeness.
dummy.c - The purpose of this driver is to provide a device to point a
route through, but not to actually transmit packets.
eql.c - Load Equalizer, enslaves multiple devices (usually modems) and
balances the Tx load across them while presenting a single device to
the network programs.
ibmtr.c - IBM Token Ring, which is not really ethernet. Broken-Ring
requires source routing and other uglies.
loopback.c - Loopback device, for which all packets from your machine
and destined for your own machine go. It essentially just moves the
packet off the Tx queue and onto the Rx queue.
pi2.c - Ottawa Amateur Radio Club PI and PI2 interface.
plip.c - Parallel Line Internet Protocol, allows two computers to send
packets to each other over two joined parallel ports in a point-to-
point fashion.
ppp.c - Point-to-Point Protocol (RFC1331), for the Transmission of
Multi-protocol Datagrams over a Point-to-Point Link (again usually
modems).
slip.c - Serial Line Internet Protocol, allows two computers to send
packets to each other over two joined serial ports (usually via
modems) in a point-to-point fashion.
tunnel.c - Provides an IP tunnel through which you can tunnel network
traffic transparently across subnets
wavelan.c - An Ethernet-like radio transceiver controlled by the Intel
82586 coprocessor which is used on other ethercards such as the Intel
EtherExpress.
6. Cables, Coax, Twisted Pair
If you are starting a network from scratch, you will have to decide
whether to use thin ethernet (RG58 co-ax cable with BNC connectors) or
10baseT (twisted pair telco-style cables with RJ-45 eight wire `phone'
connectors). The old-fashioned thick ethernet, RG-5 cable with N
connectors is obsolete and rarely seen anymore.
See ``Type of cable...'' for an introductory look at cables. Also
note that the FAQ from comp.dcom.lans.ethernet has a lot of useful
information on cables and such. FTP to rtfm.mit.edu and look in
/pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/ for the FAQ for that newsgroup.
6.1. Thin Ethernet (thinnet)
Thin ethernet cable is pretty inexpensive. If you are making your own
cables solid-core RG58A is $0.27/m. and stranded RG58AU is $0.45/m.
Twist-on BNC connectors are < $2 ea., and other misc. pieces are
similarly inexpensive. It is essential that you properly terminate
each end of the cable with 50 ohm terminators, so budget $2 ea. for a
pair. It's also vital that your cable have no `stubs' -- the `T'
connectors must be attached directly to the ethercards.
There are two main drawbacks to using thinnet. The first is that it is
limited to 10Mb/sec - 100Mb/sec requires twisted pair. The second
drawback is that if you have a big loop of machines connected
together, and some bonehead breaks the loop by taking one cable off
the side of his tee, the whole network goes down because it sees an
infinite impedance (open circuit) instead of the required 50 ohm
termination. Note that you can remove the tee piece from the card
itself without killing the whole subnet, as long as you don't remove
the cables from the tee itself. Of course this will disturb the
machine that you pull the actual tee off of. 8-) And if you are doing
a small network of two machines, you still need the tees and the 50
ohm terminators -- you can't just cable them together!
There are also some fancy cable systems which look like a single lead
going to the card, but the lead is actually two runs of cable laying
side-by-side covered by an outer sheath, giving the lead an oval
shaped cross-section. At the turnaround point of the loop, a BNC
connector is spliced in which connects to your card. So you have the
equivalent of two runs of cable and a BNC T, but in this case, it is
impossible for the user to remove a cable from one side of the T and
disturb the network.
6.2. Twisted Pair
Twisted pair networks require active hubs, which start around $50, and
the raw cable cost can actually be higher than thinnet. You can
pretty much ignore claims that you can use your existing telephone
wiring as it is a rare installation where that turns out to be the
case.
On the other hand, all 100Mb/sec ethernet proposals use twisted pair,
and most new business installations use twisted pair. Also, Russ
Nelson adds that `New installations should use Category 5 wiring.
Anything else is a waste of your installer's time, as 100Base-whatever
is going to require Cat 5.'
If you are only connecting two machines, it is possible to avoid using
a hub, by swapping the Rx and Tx pairs (1-2 and 3-6).
If you hold the RJ-45 connector facing you (as if you were going to
plug it into your mouth) with the lock tab on the top, then the pins
are numbered 1 to 8 from left to right. The pin usage is as follows:
Pin Number Assignment
---------- ----------
1 Output Data (+)
2 Output Data (-)
3 Input Data (+)
4 Reserved for Telephone use
5 Reserved for Telephone use
6 Input Data (-)
7 Reserved for Telephone use
8 Reserved for Telephone use
If you want to make a cable, the following should spell it out for
you. Differential signal pairs must be on the same twisted pair to
get the required minimal impedance/loss of a UTP cable. If you look
at the above table, you will see that 1+2 and 3+6 are the two sets of
differential signal pairs. Not 1+3 and 2+6 !!!!!! At 10MHz, with
short lengths, you *may* get away with such errors, if it is only over
a short length. Don't even think about it at 100MHz.
For a normal patch cord, with ends `A' and `B', you want straight
through pin-to-pin mapping, with the input and output each using a
pair of twisted wires (for impedance issues). That means 1A goes to
1B, 2A goes to 2B, 3A goes to 3B and 6A goes to 6B. The wires joining
1A-1B and 2A-2B must be a twisted pair. Also the wires joining 3A-3B
and 6A-6B must be another twisted pair.
Now if you don't have a hub, and want to make a `null cable', what you
want to do is make the input of `A' be the output of `B' and the
output of `A' be the input of `B', without changing the polarity. Tha
means connecting 1A to 3B (out+ A to in+ B) and 2A to 6B (out- A to
in- B). These two wires must be a twisted pair. They carry what
card/plug `A' considers output, and what is seen as input for
card/plug `B'. Then connect 3A to 1B (in+ A to out+ B) and also
connect 6A to 2B (in- A to out- B). These second two must also be a
twisted pair. They carry what card/plug `A' considers input, and what
card/plug `B' considers output.
So, if you consider a normal patch cord, chop one end off of it, swap
the places of the Rx and Tx twisted pairs into the new plug, and crimp
it down, you then have a `null' cable. Nothing complicated. You just
want to feed the Tx signal of one card into the Rx of the second and
vice versa.
Note that before 10BaseT was ratified as a standard, there existed
other network formats using RJ-45 connectors, and the same wiring
scheme as above. Examples are SynOptics's LattisNet, and AT&T's
StarLAN. In some cases, (as with early 3C503 cards) you could set
jumpers to get the card to talk to hubs of different types, but in
most cases cards designed for these older types of networks will not
work with standard 10BaseT networks/hubs. (Note that if the cards also
have an AUI port, then there is no reason as to why you can't use
that, combined with an AUI to 10BaseT transceiver.)
6.3. Thick Ethernet
Thick ethernet is mostly obsolete, and is usually used only to remain
compatible with an existing implementation. You can stretch the rules
and connect short spans of thick and thin ethernet together with a
passive $3 N-to-BNC connector, and that's often the best solution to
expanding an existing thicknet. A correct (but expensive) solution is
to use a repeater in this case.
7. Software Configuration and Card Diagnostics
In most cases, if the configuration is done by software, and stored in
an EEPROM, you will usually have to boot DOS, and use the vendor
supplied DOS program to set the cards IRQ, I/O, mem_addr and whatnot.
Besides, hopefully it is something you will only be setting once. If
you don't have the DOS software for your card, try looking on the WWW
site of your card manufacturer. If you don't know the site name, take
a guess at it, i.e. `www.my_vendor.com' where `my_vendor' is the name
of your card manufacturer. This works for SMC, 3Com, and many many
other manufacturers.
There are some cards for which Linux versions of the config utils
exist, and they are listed here. Donald has written a few small card
diagnostic programs that run under Linux. Most of these are a result
of debugging tools that he has created while writing the various
drivers. Don't expect fancy menu-driven interfaces. You will have to
read the source code to use most of these. Even if your particular
card doesn't have a corresponding diagnostic, you can still get some
information just by typing cat /proc/net/dev -- assuming that your
card was at least detected at boot.
In either case, you will have to run most of these programs as root
(to allow I/O to the ports) and you probably want to shut down the
ethercard before doing so by typing ifconfig eth0 down first.
7.1. Configuration Programs for Ethernet Cards
7.1.1. WD80x3 Cards
For people with wd80x3 cards, there is the program wdsetup which can
be found in wdsetup-0.6a.tar.gz on Linux ftp sites. It is not being
actively maintained, and has not been updated for quite a while. If it
works fine for you then great, if not, use the DOS version that you
should have got with your card. If you don't have the DOS version, you
will be glad to know that the SMC setup/driver disks are available at
SMC's ftp site. Of course, you have to have an EEPROM card to use
this utility. Old, old wd8003 cards, and some wd8013 clones use
jumpers to set up the card instead.
7.1.2. Digital / DEC Cards
The Digital EtherWorks 3 card can be configured in a similar fashion
to the DOS program NICSETUP.EXE. David C. Davies wrote this and other
tools for the EtherWorks 3 in conjunction with the driver. Look on you
local linux FTP site in the directory
/pub/linux/system/Network/management for the file that is named
ewrk3tools-X.XX.tar.gz.
7.1.3. NE2000+ or AT/LANTIC Cards
Some Nat Semi DP83905 implementations (such as the AT/LANTIC and the
NE2000+) are software configurable. (Note that these cards can also
emulate a wd8013 card!) You can get the file
/pub/linux/setup/atlantic.c from Donald's ftp server,
cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov to configure this card. In addition, the
configuration programs for the Kingston DP83905 cards seem to work
with all cards, as they don't check for a vendor specific address
before allowing you to use them. Follow the following URL: Kingston
Software <http://www.kingston.com/download/etherx/etherx.htm> and get
20XX12.EXE and INFOSET.EXE.
Be careful when configuring NE2000+ cards, as you can give them bad
setting values which can cause problems. A typical example is
accidentally enabling the boot ROM in the EEPROM (even if no ROM is
installed) to a setting that conflicts with the VGA card. The result
is a computer that just beeps at you when you turn it on and nothing
appears on the screen.
You can typically recover from this by doing the following: Remove the
card from the machine, and then boot and enter the CMOS setup. Change
the `Display Adapter' to `Not Installed' and change the default boot
drive to `A:' (your floppy drive). Also change the `Wait for F1 if
any Error' to `Disabled'. This way, the computer should boot without
user intervention. Now create a bootable DOS floppy (`format a: /s
/u') and copy the program default.exe from the 20XX12.EXE archive
above onto that floppy. Then type echo default > a:autoexec.bat so
that the program to set the card back to sane defaults will be run
automatically when you boot from this floppy. Shut the machine off,
re-install the ne2000+ card, insert your new boot floppy, and power it
back up. It will still probably beep at you, but eventually you should
see the floppy light come on as it boots from the floppy. Wait a
minute or two for the floppy to stop, indicating that it has finished
running the default.exe program, and then power down your computer.
When you then turn it on again, you should hopefully have a working
display again, allowing you to change your CMOS settings back, and to
change the card's EEPROM settings back to the values you want.
Note that if you don't have DOS handy, you can do the whole method
above with a linux boot disk that automatically runs Donald's atlantic
program (with the right command line switches) instead of a DOS boot
disk that automatically runs the default.exe program.
7.1.4. 3Com Cards
The 3Com Etherlink III family of cards (i.e. 3c5x9) can be configured
by using another config utility from Donald. You can get the file
/pub/linux/setup/3c5x9setup.c from Donald's ftp server,
cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov to configure these cards. (Note that the DOS
3c5x9B config utility may have more options pertaining to the new
``B'' series of the Etherlink III family.)
7.2. Diagnostic Programs for Ethernet Cards
Any of the diagnostic programs that Donald has written can be obtained
from this URL.
Ethercard Diagnostics
<ftp://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/linux/diag/index.html>
Allied Telesis AT1700 -- look for the file /pub/linux/diag/at1700.c on
cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov.
Cabletron E21XX -- look for the file /pub/linux/diag/e21.c on
cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov.
HP PCLAN+ -- look for the file /pub/linux/diag/hp+.c on
cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov.
Intel EtherExpress -- look for the file /pub/linux/diag/eexpress.c on
cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov.
NE2000 cards -- look for the file /pub/linux/diag/ne2k.c on
cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov. There is also a PCI version for the now common
NE2000-PCI clones.
RealTek (ATP) Pocket adaptor -- look for the file /pub/linux/diag/atp-
diag.c on cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov.
All Other Cards -- try typing cat /proc/net/dev and dmesg to see what
useful info the kernel has on the card in question.
8. Technical Information
For those who want to understand a bit more about how the card works,
or play with the present drivers, or even try to make up their own
driver for a card that is presently unsupported, this information
should be useful. If you do not fall into this category, then perhaps
you will want to skip this section.
8.1. Programmed I/O vs. Shared Memory vs. DMA
If you can already send and receive back-to-back packets, you just
can't put more bits over the wire. Every modern ethercard can receive
back-to-back packets. The Linux DP8390 drivers (wd80x3, SMC-Ultra,
3c503, ne2000, etc) come pretty close to sending back-to-back packets
(depending on the current interrupt latency) and the 3c509 and AT1500
hardware have no problem at all automatically sending back-to-back
packets.
The ISA bus can do 5.3MB/sec (42Mb/sec), which sounds like more than
enough for 10Mbps ethernet. In the case of the 100Mbps cards, you
clearly need a faster bus to take advantage of the network bandwidth.
8.1.1. Programmed I/O (e.g. NE2000, 3c509)
Pro: Doesn't use any constrained system resources, just a few I/O
registers, and has no 16M limit.
Con: Usually the slowest transfer rate, the CPU is waiting the whole
time, and interleaved packet access is usually difficult to
impossible.
8.1.2. Shared memory (e.g. WD80x3, SMC-Ultra, 3c503)
Pro: Simple, faster than programmed I/O, and allows random access to
packets. Where possible, the linux drivers compute the checksum of
incoming IP packets as they are copied off the card, resulting in a
further reduction of CPU usage vs. an equivalent PIO card.
Con: Uses up memory space (a big one for DOS users, essentially a non-
issue under Linux), and it still ties up the CPU.
8.1.3. Slave (normal) Direct Memory Access (e.g. none for Linux!)
Pro: Frees up the CPU during the actual data transfer.
Con: Checking boundary conditions, allocating contiguous buffers, and
programming the DMA registers makes it the slowest of all techniques.
It also uses up a scarce DMA channel, and requires aligned low memory
buffers.
8.1.4. Bus Master Direct Memory Access (e.g. LANCE, DEC 21040)
Pro: Frees up the CPU during the data transfer, can string together
buffers, can require little or no CPU time lost on the ISA bus. Most
of the bus-mastering linux drivers now use a `copybreak' scheme where
large packets are put directly into a kernel networking buffer by the
card, and small packets are copied by the CPU which primes the cache
for subsequent processing.
Con: (Only applicable to ISA bus cards) Requires low-memory buffers
and a DMA channel for cards. Any bus-master will have problems with
other bus-masters that are bus-hogs, such as some primitive SCSI
adaptors. A few badly-designed motherboard chipsets have problems with
bus-masters. And a reason for not using any type of DMA device is
using a 486 processor designed for plug-in replacement of a 386: these
processors must flush their cache with each DMA cycle. (This includes
the Cx486DLC, Ti486DLC, Cx486SLC, Ti486SLC, etc.)
8.2. Writing a Driver
The only thing that one needs to use an ethernet card with Linux is
the appropriate driver. For this, it is essential that the
manufacturer will release the technical programming information to the
general public without you (or anyone) having to sign your life away.
A good guide for the likelihood of getting documentation (or, if you
aren't writing code, the likelihood that someone else will write that
driver you really, really need) is the availability of the Crynwr (nee
Clarkson) packet driver. Russ Nelson runs this operation, and has been
very helpful in supporting the development of drivers for Linux. Net-
surfers can try this URL to look up Russ' software.
Russ Nelson's Packet Drivers <http://www.crynwr.com/crynwr/home.html>
Given the documentation, you can write a driver for your card and use
it for Linux (at least in theory). Keep in mind that some old
hardware that was designed for XT type machines will not function very
well in a multitasking environment such as Linux. Use of these will
lead to major problems if your network sees a reasonable amount of
traffic.
Most cards come with drivers for MS-DOS interfaces such as NDIS and
ODI, but these are useless for Linux. Many people have suggested
directly linking them in or automatic translation, but this is nearly
impossible. The MS-DOS drivers expect to be in 16 bit mode and hook
into `software interrupts', both incompatible with the Linux kernel.
This incompatibility is actually a feature, as some Linux drivers are
considerably better than their MS-DOS counterparts. The `8390' series
drivers, for instance, use ping-pong transmit buffers, which are only
now being introduced in the MS-DOS world.
(Ping-pong Tx buffers means using at least 2 max-size packet buffers
for Tx packets. One is loaded while the card is transmitting the
other. The second is then sent as soon as the first finished, and so
on. In this way, most cards are able to continuously send back-to-back
packets onto the wire.)
OK. So you have decided that you want to write a driver for the Foobar
Ethernet card, as you have the programming information, and it hasn't
been done yet. (...these are the two main requirements ;-) You should
start with the skeleton network driver that is provided with the Linux
kernel source tree. It can be found in the file
/usr/src/linux/drivers/net/skeleton.c in all recent kernels. Also
have a look at the Kernel Hackers Guide, at the following URL: KHG
<http://www.redhat.com:8080/HyperNews/get/khg.html>
8.3. Driver interface to the kernel
Here are some notes on the functions that you would have to write if
creating a new driver. Reading this in conjunction with the above
skeleton driver may help clear things up.
8.3.1. Probe
Called at boot to check for existence of card. Best if it can check
un-obtrsively by reading from memory, etc. Can also read from I/O
ports. Initial writing to I/O ports in a probe is not good as it may
kill another device. Some device initialization is usually done here
(allocating I/O space, IRQs,filling in the dev->??? fields etc.) You
need to know what io ports/mem the card can be configured to, how to
enable shared memory (if used) and how to select/enable interrupt
generation, etc.
8.3.2. Interrupt handler
Called by the kernel when the card posts an interrupt. This has the
job of determining why the card posted an interrupt, and acting
accordingly. Usual interrupt conditions are data to be rec'd, transmit
completed, error conditions being reported. You need to know any
relevant interrupt status bits so that you can act accordingly.
8.3.3. Transmit function
Linked to dev->hard_start_xmit() and is called by the kernel when
there is some data that the kernel wants to put out over the device.
This puts the data onto the card and triggers the transmit. You need
to know how to bundle the data and how to get it onto the card (shared
memory copy, PIO transfer, DMA?) and in the right place on the card.
Then you need to know how to tell the card to send the data down the
wire, and (possibly) post an interrupt when done. When the hardware
can't accept additional packets it should set the dev->tbusy flag.
When additional room is available, usually during a transmit-complete
interrupt, dev->tbusy should be cleared and the higher levels informed
with mark_bh(INET_BH).
8.3.4. Receive function
Called by the kernel interrupt handler when the card reports that
there is data on the card. It pulls the data off the card, packages it
into a sk_buff and lets the kernel know the data is there for it by
doing a netif_rx(sk_buff). You need to know how to enable interrupt
generation upon Rx of data, how to check any relevant Rx status bits,
and how to get that data off the card (again sh mem, PIO, DMA, etc.)
8.3.5. Open function
linked to dev->open and called by the networking layers when somebody
does ifconfig eth0 up - this puts the device on line and enables it
for Rx/Tx of data. Any special initialization incantations that were
not done in the probe sequence (enabling IRQ generation, etc.) would
go in here.
8.3.6. Close function (optional)
This puts the card in a sane state when someone does ifconfig eth0
down. It should free the IRQs and DMA channels if the hardware
permits, and turn off anything that will save power (like the
transceiver).
8.3.7. Miscellaneous functions
Things like a reset function, so that if things go south, the driver
can try resetting the card as a last ditch effort. Usually done when
a Tx times out or similar. Also a function to read the statistics
registers of the card if so equipped.
8.4. Technical information from 3Com
If you are interested in working on drivers for 3Com cards, you can
get technical documentation from 3Com. Cameron has been kind enough to
tell us how to go about it below:
3Com's Ethernet Adapters are documented for driver writers in our
`Technical References' (TRs). These manuals describe the programmer
interfaces to the boards but they don't talk about the diagnostics,
installation programs, etc that end users can see.
The Network Adapter Division marketing department has the TRs to give
away. To keep this program efficient, we centralized it in a thing
called `CardFacts.' CardFacts is an automated phone system. You call
it with a touch-tone phone and it faxes you stuff. To get a TR, call
CardFacts at 408-727-7021. Ask it for Developer's Order Form, document
number 9070. Have your fax number ready when you call. Fill out the
order form and fax it to 408-764-5004. Manuals are shipped by Federal
Express 2nd Day Service.
There are people here who think we are too free with the manuals, and
they are looking for evidence that the system is too expensive, or
takes too much time and effort. So far, 3Com customers have been
really good about this, and there's no problem with the level of
requests we've been getting. We need your continued cooperation and
restraint to keep it that way.
8.5. Notes on AMD PCnet / LANCE Based cards
The AMD LANCE (Local Area Network Controller for Ethernet) was the
original offering, and has since been replaced by the `PCnet-ISA'
chip, otherwise known as the 79C960. Note that the name `LANCE' has
stuck, and some people will refer to the new chip by the old name.
Dave Roberts of the Network Products Division of AMD was kind enough
to contribute the following information regarding this chip:
`Functionally, it is equivalent to a NE1500. The register set is
identical to the old LANCE with the 1500/2100 architecture additions.
Older 1500/2100 drivers will work on the PCnet-ISA. The NE1500 and
NE2100 architecture is basically the same. Initially Novell called it
the 2100, but then tried to distinguish between coax and 10BASE-T
cards. Anything that was 10BASE-T only was to be numbered in the 1500
range. That's the only difference.
Many companies offer PCnet-ISA based products, including HP, Racal-
Datacom, Allied Telesis, Boca Research, Kingston Technology, etc. The
cards are basically the same except that some manufacturers have added
`jumperless' features that allow the card to be configured in
software. Most have not. AMD offers a standard design package for a
card that uses the PCnet-ISA and many manufacturers use our design
without change. What this means is that anybody who wants to write
drivers for most PCnet-ISA based cards can just get the data-sheet
from AMD. Call our literature distribution center at (800)222-9323 and
ask for the Am79C960, PCnet-ISA data sheet. It's free.
A quick way to understand whether the card is a `stock' card is to
just look at it. If it's stock, it should just have one large chip on
it, a crystal, a small IEEE address PROM, possibly a socket for a boot
ROM, and a connector (1, 2, or 3, depending on the media options
offered). Note that if it's a coax card, it will have some transceiver
stuff built onto it as well, but that should be near the connector and
away from the PCnet-ISA.'
A note to would-be card hackers is that different LANCE
implementations do `restart' in different ways. Some pick up where
they left off in the ring, and others start right from the beginning
of the ring, as if just initialised.
8.6. Multicast and Promiscuous Mode
Another one of the things Donald has worked on is implementing
multicast and promiscuous mode hooks. All of the released (i.e. not
ALPHA) ISA drivers now support promiscuous mode.
Donald writes: `I'll start by discussing promiscuous mode, which is
conceptually easy to implement. For most hardware you only have to set
a register bit, and from then on you get every packet on the wire.
Well, it's almost that easy; for some hardware you have to shut the
board (potentially dropping a few packet), reconfigure it, and then
re-enable the ethercard. OK, so that's easy, so I'll move on
something that's not quite so obvious: Multicast. It can be done two
ways:
1. Use promiscuous mode, and a packet filter like the Berkeley packet
filter (BPF). The BPF is a pattern matching stack language, where
you write a program that picks out the addresses you are interested
in. Its advantage is that it's very general and programmable. Its
disadvantage is that there is no general way for the kernel to
avoid turning on promiscuous mode and running every packet on the
wire through every registered packet filter. See ``The Berkeley
Packet Filter'' for more info.
2. Using the built-in multicast filter that most etherchips have.
I guess I should list what a few ethercards/chips provide:
Chip/card Promiscuous Multicast filter
----------------------------------------
Seeq8001/3c501 Yes Binary filter (1)
3Com/3c509 Yes Binary filter (1)
8390 Yes Autodin II six bit hash (2) (3)
LANCE Yes Autodin II six bit hash (2) (3)
i82586 Yes Hidden Autodin II six bit hash (2) (4)
1. These cards claim to have a filter, but it's a simple yes/no
`accept all multicast packets', or `accept no multicast packets'.
2. AUTODIN II is the standard ethernet CRC (checksum) polynomial. In
this scheme multicast addresses are hashed and looked up in a hash
table. If the corresponding bit is enabled, this packet is
accepted. Ethernet packets are laid out so that the hardware to do
this is trivial -- you just latch six (usually) bits from the CRC
circuit (needed anyway for error checking) after the first six
octets (the destination address), and use them as an index into the
hash table (six bits -- a 64-bit table).
3. These chips use the six bit hash, and must have the table computed
and loaded by the host. This means the kernel must include the CRC
code.
4. The 82586 uses the six bit hash internally, but it computes the
hash table itself from a list of multicast addresses to accept.
Note that none of these chips do perfect filtering, and we still need
a middle-level module to do the final filtering. Also note that in
every case we must keep a complete list of accepted multicast
addresses to recompute the hash table when it changes.
8.7. The Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF)
The general idea of the developers is that the BPF functionality
should not be provided by the kernel, but should be in a (hopefully
little-used) compatibility library.
For those not in the know: BPF (the Berkeley Packet Filter) is an
mechanism for specifying to the kernel networking layers what packets
you are interested in. It's implemented as a specialized stack
language interpreter built into a low level of the networking code. An
application passes a program written in this language to the kernel,
and the kernel runs the program on each incoming packet. If the kernel
has multiple BPF applications, each program is run on each packet.
The problem is that it's difficult to deduce what kind of packets the
application is really interested in from the packet filter program, so
the general solution is to always run the filter. Imagine a program
that registers a BPF program to pick up a low data-rate stream sent to
a multicast address. Most ethernet cards have a hardware multicast
address filter implemented as a 64 entry hash table that ignores most
unwanted multicast packets, so the capability exists to make this a
very inexpensive operation. But with the BPF the kernel must switch
the interface to promiscuous mode, receive _all_ packets, and run them
through this filter. This is work, BTW, that's very difficult to
account back to the process requesting the packets.
9. Networking with a Laptop/Notebook Computer
There are several ways to put your laptop on a network. You can use
the SLIP code (and run at serial line speeds); you can get a notebook
with a supported PCMCIA slot built-in; you can get a laptop with a
docking station and plug in an ISA ethercard; or you can use a
parallel port Ethernet adapter.
9.1. Using SLIP
This is the cheapest solution, but by far the most difficult. Also,
you will not get very high transmission rates. Since SLIP is not
really related to ethernet cards, it will not be discussed further
here. See the NET-2 Howto.
9.2. PCMCIA Support
Try and determine exactly what hardware you have (ie. card
manufacturer, PCMCIA chip controller manufacturer) and then ask on the
LAPTOPS channel. Regardless, don't expect things to be all that
simple. Expect to have to fiddle around a bit, and patch kernels,
etc. Maybe someday you will be able to type `make config' 8-)
At present, the two PCMCIA chipsets that are supported are the
Databook TCIC/2 and the intel i82365.
There is a number of programs on tsx-11.mit.edu in
/pub/linux/packages/laptops/ that you may find useful. These range
from PCMCIA Ethercard drivers to programs that communicate with the
PCMCIA controller chip. Note that these drivers are usually tied to a
specific PCMCIA chip (ie. the intel 82365 or the TCIC/2)
For NE2000 compatible cards, some people have had success with just
configuring the card under DOS, and then booting linux from the DOS
command prompt via loadlin.
Things are looking up for Linux users that want PCMCIA support, as
substantial progress is being made. Pioneering this effort is David
Hinds. His latest PCMCIA support package can be obtained from:
PCMCIA Package <ftp://cb-iris.stanford.edu/pub/pcmcia>
Look for a file like pcmcia-cs-X.Y.Z.tgz where X.Y.Z will be the
latest version number. This is most likely uploaded to the
tsx-11.mit.edu FTP site as well.
Note that Donald's PCMCIA enabler works as a user-level process, and
David Hinds' is a kernel-level solution. You may be best served by
David's package as it is much more widely used and under continuous
development.
9.3. ISA Ethercard in the Docking Station.
Docking stations for laptops typically cost about $250 and provide two
full-size ISA slots, two serial and one parallel port. Most docking
stations are powered off of the laptop's batteries, and a few allow
adding extra batteries in the docking station if you use short ISA
cards. You can add an inexpensive ethercard and enjoy full-speed
ethernet performance.
9.4. Pocket / parallel port adaptors.
The `pocket' ethernet adaptors may also fit your need. Note that the
transfer speed will not be all that great (perhaps 200kB/s tops?) due
to the limitations of the parallel port interface.
Also most tie you down with a wall-brick power supply. You can
sometimes avoid the wall-brick with the adaptors by buying or making a
cable that draws power from the laptop's keyboard port. (See
``keyboard power'')
See ``DE-600 / DE-620'' and ``RealTek'' for two supported pocket
adaptors.
10. Miscellaneous.
Any other associated stuff that didn't fit in anywhere else gets
dumped here. It may not be relevant, and it may not be of general
interest but it is here anyway.
10.1. Passing Ethernet Arguments to the Kernel
Here are two generic kernel commands that can be passed to the kernel
at boot time (ether and reserve). This can be done with LILO,
loadlin, or any other booting utility that accepts optional arguments.
For example, if the command was `blah' and it expected 3 arguments
(say 123, 456, and 789) then, with LILO, you would use:
LILO: linux blah=123,456,789
For more information on (and a complete list of) boot time arguments,
please see the BootPrompt-HOWTO
<http://metalab.unc.edu/mdw/HOWTO/BootPrompt-HOWTO.html>
10.1.1. The ether command
The ether= argument is used in conjunction with drivers that are
directly built into the kernel. The ether= argument will have
absolutely no effect on a modular driver. In its most generic form,
it looks something like this:
ether=IRQ,BASE_ADDR,PARAM_1,PARAM_2,NAME
All arguments are optional. The first non-numeric argument is taken
as the NAME.
IRQ: Obvious. An IRQ value of `0' (usually the default) means to
autoIRQ. It's a historical accident that the IRQ setting is first
rather than the base_addr -- this will be fixed whenever something
else changes.
BASE_ADDR: Also obvious. A value of `0' (usually the default) means
to probe a card-type-specific address list for an ethercard.
PARAM_1: It was orginally used as an override value for the memory
start for a shared-memory ethercard, like the WD80*3. Some drivers
use the low four bits of this value to set the debug message level. 0
-- default, 1-7 -- level 1..7, (7 is maximum verbosity) 8 -- level 0
(no messages). Also, the LANCE driver uses the low four bits of this
value to select the DMA channel. Otherwise it uses auto-DMA.
PARAM_2: The 3c503 driver uses this to select between the internal and
external transceivers. 0 -- default/internal, 1 -- AUI external. The
Cabletron E21XX card also uses the low 4 bits of PARAM_2 to select the
output media. Otherwise it detects automatically.
NAME: Selects the network device the values refer to. The standard
kernel uses the names `eth0', `eth1', `eth2' and `eth3' for bus-
attached ethercards, and `atp0' for the parallel port `pocket'
ethernet adaptor. The arcnet driver uses `arc0' as its name. The
default setting is for a single ethercard to be probed for as `eth0'.
Multiple cards can only be enabled by explicitly setting up their base
address using these LILO parameters. The 1.0 kernel has LANCE-based
ethercards as a special case. LILO arguments are ignored, and LANCE
cards are always assigned `eth<n>' names starting at `eth0'.
Additional non-LANCE ethercards must be explicitly assigned to
`eth<n+1>', and the usual `eth0' probe disabled with something like
`ether=0,-1,eth0'. ( Yes, this is bug. )
10.1.2. The reserve command
This next lilo command is used just like `ether=' above, ie. it is
appended to the name of the boot select specified in lilo.conf
reserve=IO-base,extent{,IO-base,extent...}
In some machines it may be necessary to prevent device drivers from
checking for devices (auto-probing) in a specific region. This may be
because of poorly designed hardware that causes the boot to freeze
(such as some ethercards), hardware that is mistakenly identified,
hardware whose state is changed by an earlier probe, or merely
hardware you don't want the kernel to initialize.
The reserve boot-time argument addresses this problem by specifying an
I/O port region that shouldn't be probed. That region is reserved in
the kernel's port registration table as if a device has already been
found in that region. Note that this mechanism shouldn't be necessary
on most machines. Only when there is a problem or special case would
it be necessary to use this.
The I/O ports in the specified region are protected against device
probes. This was put in to be used when some driver was hanging on a
NE2000, or misidentifying some other device as its own. A correct
device driver shouldn't probe a reserved region, unless another boot
argument explicitly specifies that it do so. This implies that
reserve will most often be used with some other boot argument. Hence
if you specify a reserve region to protect a specific device, you must
generally specify an explicit probe for that device. Most drivers
ignore the port registration table if they are given an explicit
address.
For example, the boot line
LILO: linux reserve=0x300,32 ether=0,0x300,eth0
keeps all device drivers except the ethercard drivers from probing
0x300-0x31f.
As usual with boot-time specifiers there is an 11 parameter limit,
thus you can only specify 5 reserved regions per reserve keyword.
Multiple reserve specifiers will work if you have an unusually
complicated request.
10.2. Using the Ethernet Drivers as Modules
Most of the linux distributions now ship kernels that have very few
drivers built-in. The drivers are instead supplied as a bunch of
independent dynamically loadable modules. These modular drivers are
typically loaded by the administrator with the modprobe(8) command, or
in some cases they are automatically loaded by the kernel through
`kerneld' (in 2.0) or `kmod' (in 2.1) which then calls modprobe.
You particular distribution may offer nice graphical configuration
tools for setting up ethernet modules. If possible you should try and
use them first. The description that follows here gives information on
what underlies any fancy configuration program, and what these
programs change.
The information that controls what modules are to be used and what
options are supplied to each module is usually stored in the file
/etc/conf.modules. The two main options of interest (for ethernet
cards) that will be used in this file are alias and options. The
modprobe command consults this file for module information.
The actual modules themselves are typically stored in a directory
named /lib/modules/`uname -r`/net where the uname -r command gives the
kernel version (e.g. 2.0.34). You can look in there to see which
module matches your card.
The first thing you need in your conf.modules file is something to
tell modprobe what driver to use for the eth0 (and eth1 and...)
network interface. You use the alias command for this. For example,
if you have an ISA SMC EtherEZ card which uses the smc-ultra.o driver
module, you need to alias this driver to eth0 by adding the line:
alias eth0 smc-ultra
The other thing you may need is an options line indicating what
options are to be used with a particular module (or module alias).
Continuing with the above example, if you only used the single alias
line with no options line, the kernel would warn you (see dmesg) that
autoprobing for ISA cards is not a good idea. To get rid of this
warning, you would add another line telling the module what I/O base
the card is configured to, in this case say the hexidecimal address
0x280 for example.
options smc-ultra io=0x280
Most ISA modules accept parameters like io=0x340 and irq=12 on the
insmod command line. It is REQUIRED or at least STRONGLY ADVISED that
you supply these parameters to avoid probing for the card. Unlike PCI
and EISA devices, there is no real safe way to do auto-probing for
most ISA devices, and so it should be avoided when using drivers as
modules.
A list of all the options that each module accepts can be found in the
file:
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/networking/net-modules.txt
It is recommended that you read that to find out what options you can
use for your particular card. Note that some modules support comma
separated value lists for modules that have the capability to handle
multiple devices from a single module, such as all the 8390 based
drivers, and the PLIP driver. For exmple:
______________________________________________________________________
options 3c503 io=0x280,0x300,0x330,0x350 xcvr=0,1,0,1
______________________________________________________________________
The above would have the one module controlling four 3c503 cards, with
card 2 and 4 using external transcievers. Don't put spaces around the
`=' or commas.
Also note that a busy module can't be removed. That means that you
will have to ifconfig eth0 down (shut down the ethernet card) before
you can remove the module(s).
The command lsmod will show you what modules are loaded, whether they
are in use, and rmmod will remove them.
10.3. Related Documentation
Much of this info came from saved postings from the comp.os.linux
groups, which shows that it is a valuable resource of information.
Other useful information came from a bunch of small files by Donald
himself. Of course, if you are setting up an Ethernet card, then you
will want to read the NET-2 Howto so that you can actually configure
the software you will use. Also, if you fancy yourself as a bit of a
hacker, you can always scrounge some additional info from the driver
source files as well. There is usually a paragraph or two in there
describing any important points before any actual code starts..
For those looking for information that is not specific in any way to
Linux (i.e. what is 10BaseT, what is AUI, what does a hub do, etc.) I
strongly recommend making use of the newsgroup comp.dcom.lans.ethernet
and/or comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.networking. Newsgroup archives such
as those at dejanews.com can also be an invaluable source of
information. You can grab the newsgroup FAQ from RTFM (which holds
all the newsgroup FAQs) at the following URL:
Usenet FAQs <ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/>
You can also have a look at the `Ethernet-HomePage' so to speak, which
is at the following URL:
Ethernet-HomePage <http://wwwhost.ots.utexas.edu/ethernet/ethernet-
home.html>
10.4. Disclaimer and Copyright
This document is not gospel. However, it is probably the most up to
date info that you will be able to find. Nobody is responsible for
what happens to your hardware but yourself. If your ethercard or any
other hardware goes up in smoke (...nearly impossible!) we take no
responsibility. ie. THE AUTHORS ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGES
INCURRED DUE TO ACTIONS TAKEN BASED ON THE INFORMATION INCLUDED IN
THIS DOCUMENT.
This document is Copyright (c) 1993-1997 by Paul Gortmaker.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are
preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this
document under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that this
copyright notice is included exactly as in the original, and that the
entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a
permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this
document into another language, under the above conditions for
modified versions.
A hint to people considering doing a translation. First, translate
the SGML source (available via FTP from the HowTo main site) so that
you can then generate other output formats. Be sure to keep a copy of
the original English SGML source that you translated from! When an
updated HowTo is released, get the new SGML source for that version,
and then a simple diff -u old.sgml new.sgml will show you exactly what
has changed so that you can easily incorporate those changes into your
translated SMGL source without having to re-read or re-translate
everything.
If you are intending to incorporate this document into a published
work, please make contact (via e-mail) so that you can be supplied
with the most up to date information available. In the past, out of
date versions of the Linux HowTo documents have been published, which
caused the developers undue grief from being plagued with questions
that were already answered in the up to date versions.
10.5. Closing
If you have found any glaring typos, or outdated info in this
document, please send an e-mail. It is big, and it is easy to overlook
stuff. If you have e-mailed about a change, and it hasn't been
included in the next version, please don't hesitate to send it again,
as it might have got lost amongst the usual sea of SPAM and junk mail
I get.
Thanks!
Paul Gortmaker, p_gortmaker@yahoo.com