onboard NIC: Attansic L2

Rick Stevens rstevens at internap.com
Mon Jan 28 21:54:16 UTC 2008


On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 13:07 -0800, Dan Thurman wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> Motherboard: P5GC-MX/1333,  onboard Attansic L2 NIC chip
> 
> Earlier I reported a nightmarish experience trying to get my onboard Attansic 
> L2 NIC working after compiling the source code for it, installing it, and so 
> on and could not figure out why the NIC was not turning on the phyiscal link.
> 
> I think I understand the symptoms but not the underlying cause.
> 
> I reported in my earlier post, that I blamed the twisted pair cable but it 
> turns out this was not the problem.  The cabled is fine.  I had to go to my 
> garbage can to retrieve the cable I almost threw out.
> 
> I can repeatedly prove (at least to myself), that under a multiboot situation,
> if you boot using w2000/XP, M$ turns ON/OFF/ON the link when coming up and 
> when it is shutdown/rebooted, it disables the link.  It somehow turns the NIC 
> OFF on reboot/shutdown.
> 
> When you bootup Fedora, Fedora goes along as it normally does, probes eth0,
> but FAILS to turn ON the link.  You CANNOT get Fedora to bring up the link no 
> matter what you do. The ONLY way to get the link back is to physically power 
> off the power supply because the motherboard always get's it's power unless 
> the PS itself is turned off and until the power drains out.
> 
> Only then, you can bring up Fedora's OS and get the NIC link to work.
> 
> I wonder if M$ plugs microcode into the Attansic L2 chip that renders Fedora 
> unable to turn on the link OR the code is missing from the Fedora networking 
> process to turn ON the link.
> 
> Can someone in development look into this and let me know what is going on?
> 
> At the moment, I have a temporary solution for now but I'd like to make sure 
> no other helpless chap faces this problem like I did for weeks trying to 
> figure this out.

Does "iwconfig wlan0 txpower on" turn on your card?  Is there a modprobe
option you need?  "modinfo name-of-driver" should show you those.  On my
iwl4965, there's an option:

	options iwl4965 disable=1

which would turn off the radio.  By default it's on ("disable=0").
Perhaps yours is backwards?

----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer             rstevens at internap.com -
- CDN Systems, Internap, Inc.                http://www.internap.com -
-                                                                    -
-  What's small, yellow and very, VERY dangerous?  The root canary!  -
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