onboard NIC: Attansic L2
Chris Snook
csnook at redhat.com
Tue Jan 29 08:23:39 UTC 2008
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.
>
> Regards,
> Dan
>
Are you using the version of the driver that came with the motherboard, or my
cleaned up version? I've fixed a few bugs, but this one doesn't sound familiar,
so it's quite possible my code doesn't fix this either. If you want to try it
out, it's here:
http://people.redhat.com/csnook/atl2/
I'm working on getting this merged for 2.6.25, and once that's done I'll start
thinking about Fedora kernel backports.
Please report test results to me off-list. We might need to instrument it a bit
to find out what the #$^% Windows is doing to it, since most of my testing so
far has been on single-boot ASUS EeePCs.
-- Chris
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