ifconfig and route. See the Network
Howto for that stuff.
ether= thing didn't
do anything for me. Why?
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 2.2.17.
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@scyld.com
who we should thank for writing a lot of the 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) 1993-2000 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.
New versions of this document can be retrieved from:
or for those wishing to use FTP and/or get non-HTML formats:
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.
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)
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. Of course the same holds true when e-mailing a problem report - always provide as much information as possible.
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 thinnet, or thin ethernet cabling, (RG-58 coaxial cable) with the BNC (metal push and turn-to-lock) connectors is technically called 10Base2.
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.
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.
Most installations will use 10BaseT/100BaseT 10Base2 does not offer any upgrade path to 100Base-whatever. 10Base2 is fine for hobbyists setting up a home network when purchasing a hub is not desireable for some reason or another.
See Cables, Coax... for other concerns with different types of ethernet cable.
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.
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 moving data over the network 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.
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: www.scyld.com 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:
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.
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
0x350 and 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some systems have an `enable PnP OS' (or similar named) option in the BIOS/CMOS setup menu which will need to be disabled in nearly all cases or the cards won't work properly, or even be detected . Best described by one user who said `I don't know what it does behind the scenes, but it seems to be evil.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Werner Almesberger has been working on ATM support for linux. He has been working with the Efficient Networks ENI155p board ( Efficient Networks) and the Zeitnet ZN1221 board ( Zeitnet).
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:
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://www.scyld.com/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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For the most up to date information on Sparc stuff, try the following URL:
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
/dev/ for EthercardsI 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 WWW/FTP site with various goodies:
www.3Com.com that you may want to check out. They
even have linux drivers for some of their cards there you may
wish to test out. It has been reported that their drivers are not
stable and/or unuseable on SMP and non ix86 based machines, so
you may want to keep that in mind.
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.
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.
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: 3c505
These cards use the i82586 chip but are not that many of them 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.
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.
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.
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:
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/
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip, OR rtl8139
Apparently there have been several revisions of the EN1207 (A through D) with A, B, and C being tulip based and the D revision being RealTek 8139 based (different driver). So as with all purchases, you should try and make sure you can return it if it doesn't work for you.
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
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.
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....
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.
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne, ne2k-pci (+8390)
Yet another PCI NE2000 clone card. This one is based on the RealTek 8029 chip.
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....
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: rtl8139
This card uses the RealTek 8139 chip - see the section RealTek 8139.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
This has been confirmed to work just like the '971.
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.
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.
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.
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!) Note that the arcnet driver uses `arc0' as its name instead of the usual `eth0' for ethernet devices.
There are information files contained in the standard kernel for setting jumpers, general hints and where to mail bug reports.
Supposedly the driver also works with the 100Mbs ARCnet cards as well!
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.
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.
Yes, they make more than just multi-port serial cards.
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne (+8390)
Apparently this is a NE2000 clone, using a VIA VT86C916 chip.
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.
Boca was offering a `warranty repair' for affected owners, which involved adding one of the missing capacitors, but it appears that this fix didn't work 100 percent for most people, although it helps some.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Compaq aren't really in the business of making ethernet cards, but a lot of their systems have embedded ethernet controllers on the motherboard.
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.
Status: Supported, Driver Name: tlan
These systems use a Texas Instruments ThunderLAN chip Information on the ThunderLAN driver can be found in ThunderLAN.
Status: Supported, Driver Name: eepro100
Check your card - if it has part number 323551-821 and/or an intel 82558 chip on it then it is another Intel EEPro100 based card.
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.
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.
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....
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne, ne2k-pci (+8390)
Apparently D-Link have also started making PCI NE2000 clones.
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. Note that this is NOT the DFE-530.
See DEC 21040 for more information on these cards, and the present driver situation.
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. 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, as the
address is compiled directly into the driver. Also note that some
laptops implement the on-board parallel port at
0x3bc which is where the parallel ports on
monochrome cards were/are.
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.
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.
Status Supported, Driver Name: via-rhine
Another card using the VIA Rhine chipset. (see VIA Rhine) Don't confuse this with the DE-530 which is a tulip based card.
Status Supported, Driver Name: rtl8139, 8139too
This card uses the RealTek 8139 chip - see the section RealTek 8139.
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne (+8390)
Yet another poor NE clone card - these 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 should
use. (The 300 is an 8 bit pseudo NE1000 clone, and the 400 is a
pseudo NE2000 clone.)
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.
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ewrk3
These cards use a proprietary chip from DEC, as opposed to the LANCE chip u