Hello,
I was having problems with these FreedomLine cards with Linux before but
tested it thoroughly today. This card uses DEC 21041 chip and has TP and BNC
connectors:
00:12.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Digital Equipment Corporation DECchip
21041 [Tulip Pass 3] [1011:0014] (rev 21)
de2104x driver was loaded automatically by udev and card seemed to work. Until
I disconnected the TP cable and putting it back after a while. The driver
then switched to (non-existing) AUI port and remained there. I tried to set
media to TP using ethtool - and the whole kernel crashed because of
BUG_ON(de_is_running(de));
in de_set_media(). Seems that the driver is unable to stop the DMA in
de_stop_rxtx().
I commented out AUI detection in the driver - this time it switched to BNC
after unplugging the cable and remained there. I also attempted to reset the
chip when de_stop_rxtx failed but failed to do it.
Then I found that there's de4x5 driver which supports the same cards as
de2104x (and some other too) - and this one works fine! I can plug and unplug
the cable and even change between TP and BNC ports just by unplugging one and
plugging the other cable in. Unfortunately, this driver is blacklisted by
default - at least in Slackware and Debian.
The question is: why does de2104x exist? Does it work better with some
hardware?
BTW. Found that the problem exist at least since 2003:
http://oss.sgi.com/archives/netdev/2003-08/msg00951.html
--
Ondrej Zary
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