Linux Ethernet-Howto
by Paul Gortmaker
v2.9, Aug 25, 2003
This is the Ethernet-Howto, which is a compilation of information
about which ethernet devices can be used for Linux, and how to
set them up. Note that this Howto is focused
on the hardware and low level driver aspect of the ethernet cards,
and does not cover the software end of things like ifconfig
and route. That information is found in various other Linux documentation.
The Ethernet-Howto contains detailed information on the current level
of support for most of the common ethernet cards available.
It covers common hardware configuration problems, and problems
associated with choosing the right driver, and then getting that
driver loaded and functional. It does not cover the next
stages of setup (choosing an internet address, routing, etc).
That information can be found in various other Linux documentation.
In the early days of linux, the old ISA type ethernet cards
were the norm. The ISA bus had no sane or safe way for linux
to determine what cards were installed, or what settings
each card was to use. This meant that the end user was more
involved in supplying this information to linux, and they
turned to this guide for help on doing this.
Fortunately, the newer PCI bus can be found in nearly every
computer that is out there today, and the ISA bus is left
to collect dust with the 386 and 486 computers of yesteryear.
The designers of the PCI bus recognized the problem with
card detection on the old ISA bus, and so added support for
each card to be able to communicate to the host computer their
manufacturer and model, and what settings are to be used.
This slow demise of the ISA bus has reduced the involvement of
the end user drastically. As such, most of today's linux users
would not need to turn to this guide for help. However there
are always some corner cases where things don't work as expected,
or some problems that need troubleshooting. And of course
there are still some old ISA computers out there doing thankless
dedicated tasks in the bottom of dark closets too.
This present revision covers ethernet drivers found in
kernels up to and including version 2.4.21. Some features
pertaining to the upcoming 2.6 release are also mentioned.
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.
This document is Copyright (c) 1993-2003 by Paul Gortmaker.
Yes, I have been maintaing this thing for 10 years now!
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:
Ethernet-HOWTO
or for those wishing to use FTP and/or get non-HTML formats:
Sunsite HOWTO Archive
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)
As a quick overview, you need to: 1) have a plug in ethernet
card or motherboard that has ethernet support built in,
2) determine the brand or make and model of the ethernet
card or on-board ethernet chip, 3) determine if a linux
driver for this model of card/chip does exist, 4) locate
and load this driver, 5) check driver output to verify
it found your card, 6) set or configure network parameters
for the newly detected network interface.
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
using the lspci utility for obtaining information
on the PCI devices in your computer. Doing a
cat /proc/pci gives similar (but less) information.
For ISA cards, see 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.
With most Linux distributions, the drivers exist as loadable
modules, which are small binary files that are merged with
the operating system at run time. A module gives the
operating system (kernel) the information on how to control
that particular ethernet card. The name of each module is
listed in the heading of the section for each card in this
document. Once you know the name of the module, you have to
add it to the file /etc/modules.conf so Linux will
know what module to load for your card. The syntax is typically
as follows.
alias eth0 module_name
options module_name option1=value1 option2=value2 ...
The options line is typically only needed for older ISA hardware.
For multiple card systems, additional lines with eth1,
eth2 and so on are usually required.
The module files typically live in the directory
/lib/modules/ which is further subdivided by kernel
version (use uname -r) and subsystem (in this case
net). These are put there by the distribution
builder, or by the individual user when they run
make modules_install after building their own
kernel and modules (see the kernel howto for more details
on building your own stuff).
If you build your own kernel, you have the option of having
all the drivers merged with the kernel right then and there,
rather than existing as separate files. When this is done,
the drivers will detect the hardware at boot up. Options
to the drivers are supplied by the kernel command line prior
to boot (see BootPrompt Howto for more details). The user
chooses what drivers are used during the make config
step of building the kernel (again see the kernel howto).
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 ISA card
will probably keep you happy (assuming 10Mbps, not 100).
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.
In addition, some cards now can actually do some of the
processing overhead of data checksums right on the card,
giving the CPU even more of a break. For more details
please see:
Hardware Checksum/Zerocopy Page
If you fall somewhere in the middle of the above, then any
one of the low cost PCI cards with a stable
driver 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
WWW site: www.scyld.com - things
change here quite frequently, so just look around for it.
Alternatively, it may be easier to use a WWW browser on:
Don's Linux Network Home Page
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 or more 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/).
In the case of PCI cards, the PCI drivers/modules should detect
all of the installed cards that it supports automatically. The
user should not supply any I/O base or IRQ information, unless
specifically instructed to do so by the individual driver
documentation in order to support some non-standard machine.
Some earlier kernels had a limit of 16 ethercards that could
be detected at boot, and some ISA modules have a limit of four
cards per loaded module. You can always load another copy of the
same module under a different name to support another four cards
if this is a limitation, or recompile the module with support
for as many as you require.
With the Driver as a Module
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/modules.conf.
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/modules.conf 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/modules.conf
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 modules.conf
file, you can test things out with:
modprobe eth0
modprobe eth1
...
modprobe ethN-1
where `N' is the number of ethernet interfaces you have.
Note that the interface name (ethX) assigned to the driver
by the kernel is independent of the name used on the alias line.
For further details on this, see:
Using the Ethernet Drivers as Modules
With the Driver Compiled into the Kernel
Since some ISA card probes can hang the machine, kernels
up to and including 2.4 only autoprobe for
one ISA ethercard by default. As there aren't
any distribution kernels with lots of ISA drivers built
in anymore, this restriction is no longer in 2.6 and newer.
As of 2.2 and newer 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.
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.
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/modules.conf
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
in older kernels) did not have support for Plug and Play.
Solution:
Either use a 2.4 or newer kernel that has a NE2000 driver with PnP,
or 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/modules.conf 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.
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.
Linux and ISA Plug and Play Ethernet Cards
For best results (and minimum aggravation) it is recommended
that you use the (usually DOS) program that came with your
card to disable the ISA-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/modules.conf.
You may also have to enter the BIOS/CMOS setup and mark the IRQ
as Legacy-ISA instead of ISA-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 ISA-PnP enabled for compatibility with some other
operating system then what you will have to do depends
on what kernel version you are using. For 2.2.x and older
kernels, 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.
For 2.4.x and newer kernels, there is ISA-PnP support available
built right into the kernel (if selected at build time) and
if your particular driver makes use of this support, then your
card will be configured to an available I/O address and IRQ
all without any user supplied option values. You do not
want to be trying to use the user-space isapnptools and the
in kernel ISA-PnP support at the same time.
Some systems have an `enable PnP OS' (or similar named)
option in the BIOS/CMOS setup menu which does not really
have anything to do with ISA-PnP hardware.
See below for more details on this option.
PCI machine detects card but driver fails probe (PnP OS).
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.
Note that kernel version 2.4.x has better support to deal
with this option - in particular you should be able to
enable this option, and the kernel/drivers should be able
to set up and/or enable the cards on its own.
All cards detected but two fail to work in PCI machine
Version 1 of the PCI spec allowed for some slots to be
bus master and some slots to be slave (non-bus master) slots.
To avoid the problems associated with people putting BM
cards into slave slots, the v2 of the PCI spec said that all
slots should be BM capable. Hovever most PCI chipsets only
have four BM pins, and so if you have a five slot board,
chances are that two slots share one of the BM pins! This allows
the board to meet the requirements of the v2 spec (but not
the intent). So if you have a bunch of cards, and two of
them fail to work, they may be in slots that share a BM pin.
I have /etc/conf.modules and not /etc/modules.conf.
Older distributions will have conf.modules and not
modules.conf which is the more sensible name of
the two. Newer module utility programs expect the new name,
so keep that in mind if you upgrade an older system.
Ethercard is Not Detected at Boot.
The usual reason for this is that people are using a kernel
that does not have support for their particular card built
in. For a modular kernel, it usually means that the required
module has not been requested for loading.
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/modules.conf -- see man modprobe for
more details.
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/modules.conf to
specify an address that isn't probed by default.
Driver reports unresolved symbol ei_open and won't load.
You are using one of the many ethernet cards that have
an 8390 chip (or clone) on board. For such cards, the
driver comes in two parts - the part which you unsuccessfully
tried to load (e.g. ne2k-pci.o, ne.o, wd.o, smc-ultra.o
etc.) and the 8390 part. These drivers have (+8390)
listed right beside their module name in the vendor
specific information listing.
(
Vendor Specific...)
You have to make sure that the
8390.o module gets loaded before loading the
second half of the driver so that the second half of the
driver can find the functions in 8390.o that it needs.
Possible causes: (1)Forgetting to run depmod after installing
a new kernel and modules, so that module dependencies like
this are handled automatically. (2)Using insmod instead
of modprobe, as insmod doesn't check for any module
ordering constraints. (3)The module 8390.o is not
in the directory beside the other half of the driver where
it should be.
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.
Shared Memory ISA cards in PCI Machine do not work (0xffff)
This will usually show up as reads of lots of 0xffff values.
No shared memory cards of any type will work in a PCI machine
unless you have the PCI ROM BIOS/CMOS SETUP configuration set
properly. You have to set it to allow shared memory access
from the ISA bus for the memory region that your card is trying
to use. If you can't figure out which settings are applicable
then ask your supplier or local computer guru. For AMI BIOS,
there is usually a "Plug and Play" section where there will
be an ``ISA Shared Memory Size'' and ``ISA Shared Memory Base''
settings. For cards like the wd8013 and SMC Ultra, change the
size from the default of `Disabled' to 16kB, and change the base
to the shared memory address of your card.
Card seems to send data but never receives anything.
Do a cat /proc/interrupts.
A running total of the number of interrupt events your
card generates will be in the list given from the above.
If it is zero and/or doesn't increase when you try to use
the card then there is probably a physical interrupt
conflict with another device installed in the computer
(regardless of whether or not the other device has a
driver installed/available).
Change the IRQ of one of the two devices to a free IRQ.
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) Support
Werner Almesberger has been working on ATM support
for linux.
He has been working with the Efficient Networks ENI155p
board (
Efficient Networks)
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:
Linux ATM Support
Gigabit Ethernet Support
Is there any gigabit ethernet support for Linux?
Yes, there are currently several. One of the prominent
Linux network developers rated the performance of the
cards with linux drivers as follows: 1) Intel E1000,
2) Tigon2/Acenic, 3) SysKonnect sk-98xx, 4) Tigon3/bcm57xx.
This was as of March 2002 and subject to change of course.
FDDI Support
Is there FDDI support for Linux?
Yes. Larry Stefani has written
a driver for v2.0 with Digital's DEFEA (FDDI EISA)
and DEFPA (FDDI PCI) cards.
This was included into the v2.0.24 kernel. Currently
no other cards are supported though.
Full Duplex Support
Will Full Duplex give me 20MBps? Does Linux support it?
Cameron Spitzer writes the following about full duplex 10Base-T
cards: ``If you connect it to a full duplex switched hub,
and your system is fast enough and not doing much else, it can
keep the link busy in both directions.
There is no such thing as full duplex 10BASE-2 or 10BASE-5
(thin and thick coax).
Full Duplex works by disabling collision detection in the adapter.
That's why you can't do it with coax; the LAN won't run that way.
10BASE-T (RJ45 interface) uses separate wires for send and receive,
so it's possible to run both ways at the same time. The switching
hub takes care of the collision problem. The signalling rate
is 10 Mbps.''
So as you can see, you still will only be able to receive or
transmit at 10Mbps, and hence don't expect a 2x performance
increase. As to whether it is supported or not, that depends
on the card and possibly the driver. Some cards may do
auto-negotiation, some may need driver support, and some may
need the user to select an option in a card's EEPROM configuration.
Only the serious/heavy user would notice the difference between
the two modes anyway.
Ethernet Cards for Linux on SMP Machines
If you spent the extra money on a multi processor (MP) computer then
buy a good ethernet card as well. For v2.0 kernels it wasn't really
an issue, but it definitely is for v2.2. Most of the older
non-intelligent (e.g. ISA bus PIO and shared memory design) cards
were never designed with any consideration for use on a MP machine.
The executive summary is to buy an intelligent modern design
card and make sure the driver has been written (or updated) to
handle MP operation. (The key words here are `modern design' - the
PCI-NE2000's are just a 10+ year old design on a modern bus.)
Looking for the text spin_lock in the driver source is a good
indication that the driver has been written to deal with MP operation.
The full details of why you should buy a good card for MP use (and
what happens if you dont) follow.
In v2.0 kernels, only one processor was allowed `in kernel'
(i.e. changing kernel data and/or running device drivers) at any
given time. So from the point of view of the card (and the associated
driver) nothing was different from uni processor (UP) operation and
things just continued to work. (This was the easiest way to get a
working MP version of Linux - one big lock around the whole kernel
only allows one processor in at a time. This way you know that you
won't have two processors trying to change the same thing at the
same time!)
The downside to only allowing one processor in
the kernel at a time was that you only got MP performance
if the running programs were self contained and calculation intensive.
If the programs did a lot of input/output (I/O) such as reading or
writing data to disk or over a network, then all but one of the
processors would be stalled waiting on their I/O requests to be
completed while the one processor running in kernel frantically
tries to run all the device drivers to fill the I/O requests. The
kernel becomes the bottleneck and since there is only one processor
running in the kernel, the performance of a MP machine in the heavy
I/O, single-lock case quickly degrades close to that of a single
processor machine.
Since this is clearly less than ideal (esp. for file/WWW servers,
routers, etc.) the v2.2 kernels have finer grained locking - meaning
that more than one processor can be in the kernel at a time. Instead
of one big lock around the whole kernel, there are a lot of smaller
locks protecting critical data from being manipulated by more than
one processor at a time - e.g. one processor can be running the
driver for the network card, while another processor
is running the driver for the disk drive at the same time.
Okay, with that all in mind here are the snags: The finer locking
means that you can have one processor trying to send data
out through an ethernet driver while another processor tries to
access the same driver/card to do something else (such as get the
card statistics for cat /proc/net/dev). Oops - your card
stats just got sent out over the wire, while you got data for
your stats instead. Yes, the card got confused by being asked
to do two (or more!) things at once, and chances are it crashed
your machine in the process.
So, the driver that worked for UP is
no longer good enough - it needs to be updated with locks that
control access to the underlying card so that the three tasks of
receive, transmit and manipulation
of configuration data are serialized to
the degree required by the card for stable operation. The scary
part here is that a driver not yet updated with locks for stable
MP operation will probably appear to be working in a MP machine
under light network load, but will crash the machine or at least
exhibit strange behaviour when two (or more!) processors try to
do more than one of these three tasks at the same time.
The updated MP aware ethernet driver will (at a
minimum) require a lock
around the driver that limits access at the entry points
from the kernel into the driver to `one at a time please'.
With this in place, things will be serialized so that the
underlying hardware should be treated just as if it was being
used in a UP machine, and so it should be stable. The downside
is that the one lock around the whole ethernet driver has
the same negative performance implications that having one big
lock around the whole kernel had (but on a smaller scale) - i.e.
you can only have one processor dealing with the card
at a time.
[Technical Note: The performance impact may also include
increased interrupt latencies if the locks that need to be
added are of the irqsave type and they are held
for a long time.]
Possible improvements on this situation can be made in two
ways. You can try to minimize the time between when the lock is
taken and when it is released, and/or you can implement finer
grained locking within the driver (e.g. a lock around the whole
driver would be overkill if a lock or two protecting against
simultaneous access to a couple of sensitive registers/settings
on the card would suffice).
However, for older non-intelligent
cards that were never designed with MP use in mind, neither of
these improvements may be feasible. Worse yet is that the
non-intelligent cards typically require the processor to move
the data between the card and the computer memory, so in a
worst case scenario the lock will be held the whole time that
it takes to move each 1.5kB data packet over an ISA bus.
The more modern intelligent cards typically move network data
directly to and from the computer memory without any help from
a processor. This is a big win, since the lock is then only
held for the short time it takes the processor to tell the card
where in memory to get/store the next network data packet. More
modern card designs are less apt to require a single big
lock around the whole driver as well.
Ethernet Cards for Linux on Alpha/AXP PCI Boards
As of v2.0, only the 3c509, depca, de4x5, pcnet32, and all the
8390 drivers (wd, smc-ultra, ne, 3c503, etc.) have
been made `architecture independent' so as to work on the
DEC Alpha CPU based systems. Other updated PCI drivers from
Donald's WWW page may also work as these have been written
with architecture independence in mind.
Note that the changes that are required to make a driver
architecture independent aren't that complicated.
You only need to do the following:
-multiply all jiffies related values by HZ/100 to account
for the different HZ value that the Alpha uses.
(i.e timeout=2; becomes timeout=2*HZ/100;)
-replace any I/O memory (640k to 1MB) pointer dereferences with
the appropriate readb() writeb() readl() writel() calls, as
shown in this example.
- int *mem_base = (int *)dev->mem_start;
- mem_base[0] = 0xba5eba5e;
+ unsigned long mem_base = dev->mem_start;
+ writel(0xba5eba5e, mem_base);
-replace all memcpy() calls that have I/O memory as source or
target destinations with the appropriate one of
memcpy_fromio() or memcpy_toio().
Details on handling memory accesses in an architecture
independent fashion are documented in the file
linux/Documentation/IO-mapping.txt that comes
with recent kernels.
Ethernet for Linux on SUN/Sparc Hardware.
For the most up to date information on Sparc stuff, try the
following URL:
Linux Sparc
Note that some Sparc ethernet hardware gets its MAC address
from the host computer, and hence you can end up with multiple
interfaces all with the same MAC address. If you need to
put more than one interface on the same net then use the
hw option to ifconfig to assign unique MAC address.
Issues regarding porting PCI drivers to the Sparc platform
are similar to those mentioned above for the AXP platform.
In addition there may be some endian issues, as the Sparc
is big endian, and the AXP and ix86 are little endian.
Ethernet for Linux on Other Hardware.
There are several other hardware platforms that Linux can
run on, such as Atari/Amiga (m68k). As in the Sparc case
it is best to check with the home site of each Linux
port to that platform to see what is currently supported.
(Links to such sites are welcome here - send them in!)
Linking 10 or 100 BaseT without a Hub
Can I link 10/100BaseT (RJ45) based systems together without a hub?
You can link 2 machines, but no more than that, without
extra devices/gizmos, by using a crossover cable. Some newer
fancy autonegotiaton cards may not work on a crossover cable though.
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.
SIOCSIFxxx: No such device
I get a bunch of `SIOCSIFxxx: No such device' messages at
boot, followed by a `SIOCADDRT: Network is unreachable'
What is wrong?
Your ethernet device was not detected at boot/module insertion
time, and when
ifconfig and route are run, they have no device
to work with. Use dmesg | more to review the
boot messages and see if there are any messages about
detecting an ethernet card.
SIOCSFFLAGS: Try again
I get `SIOCSFFLAGS: Try again' when I run `ifconfig' -- Huh?
Some other device has taken the IRQ that your ethercard
is trying to use, and so the ethercard can't use the IRQ.
You don't necessairly need to reboot to resolve this, as
some devices only grab the IRQs when they need them and
then release them when they are done. Examples are some
sound cards, serial ports, floppy disk driver, etc. You
can type cat /proc/interrupts to see which interrupts
are presently in use. Most of the
Linux ethercard drivers only grab the IRQ when they are
opened for use via `ifconfig'. If you can get the other
device to `let go' of the required IRQ line, then you
should be able to `Try again' with ifconfig.
Using `ifconfig' and Link UNSPEC with HW-addr of 00:00:00:00:00:00
When I run ifconfig with no arguments, it reports that
LINK is UNSPEC (instead of 10Mbs Ethernet) and it
also says that my hardware address is all zeros.
This is because people are running a newer version of
the `ifconfig' program than their kernel version. This
new version of ifconfig is not able to report these properties
when used in conjunction with an older kernel. You can either
upgrade your kernel, `downgrade' ifconfig, or simply ignore
it. The kernel knows your hardware address, so it really
doesn't matter if ifconfig can't read it.
You may also get strange information if the ifconfig
program you are using is a lot older than the kernel you are
using.
Huge Number of RX and TX Errors
When I run ifconfig with no arguments, it reports that I
have a huge error count in both rec'd and transmitted
packets. It all seems to work ok -- What is wrong?
Look again. It says RX packets big number PAUSE
errors 0 PAUSE dropped 0 PAUSE overrun 0.
And the same for the TX column.
Hence the big numbers you are seeing are the total number of
packets that your machine has rec'd and transmitted.
If you still find it confusing, try typing
cat /proc/net/dev instead.
Entries in /dev/ for Ethercards
I have /dev/eth0 as a link to /dev/xxx. Is this right?
Contrary to what you have heard, the files in /dev/* are not used.
You can delete any /dev/wd0, /dev/ne0 and similar entries.
Access to the raw Ethernet Device
How do I get access to the raw ethernet device in linux,
without going through TCP/IP and friends?
int s=socket(AF_INET,SOCK_PACKET,htons(ETH_P_ALL));
This gives you a socket receiving every protocol type.
Do recvfrom() calls to it and it will fill the sockaddr
with device type in sa_family and the device name in the
sa_data array. I don't know who originally invented
SOCK_PACKET for Linux (its been in for ages) but its superb stuff.
You can use it to send stuff raw too via sendto() calls.
You have to have root access to do either of course.
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', `Obsolete',
`Dropped' 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.
Obsolete means that a driver exists, and was probably at
one time considered Semi-Supported. However, due to lack of
interest, users, and support, it is known to not work anymore.
The driver is still in the kernel, but disabled in the
configuration option menu. The general plan is that if it
does not get updated by the next kernel development cycle,
it will be dropped entirely. Usually a driver marked obsolete
simply needs an update to match changes in the kernel to
driver interface, or other similar kernel API changes.
Dropped means that the driver was once obsolete (see above)
and since there was not enough interest in fixing it, it
has been removed from the current kernel tree. There is
nothing stopping anyone from copying the driver from an
older kernel, making the required updates and using it.
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.
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/modules.conf 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. Also check out their WWW/FTP site with various goodies:
www.3Com.com that you may find useful (including PDFs
with technical info for their cards).
3c501
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: 3c501
This obsolete stone-age 8 bit card is really
too brain-damaged to use. Avoid it like the plague. Do not
purchase this card, even as a joke. It's performance
is horrible, and it breaks in many ways.
For those not yet convinced, the 3c501 can only do one
thing at a time -- while you are removing one packet
from the single-packet buffer it cannot receive
another packet, nor can it receive a packet while
loading a transmit packet. This was fine for a
network between two 8088-based computers where
processing each packet and replying took 10's of
msecs, but modern networks send back-to-back
packets for almost every transaction.
AutoIRQ works, DMA isn't used, the autoprobe only
looks at 0x280 and 0x300, and the debug level is set
with the third boot-time argument.
Once again, the use of a 3c501 is strongly discouraged!
Even more so with a IP multicast kernel, as you will
grind to a halt while listening to all multicast
packets. See the comments at the top of the source code
for more details.
EtherLink II, 3c503, 3c503/16
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c503 (+8390)
The 3c503 does not have ``EEPROM setup'',
so a diagnostic/setup program
isn't needed before running the card with Linux. The
shared memory address of the 3c503 is set using jumpers
that are shared with the boot PROM address. This is
confusing to people familiar with other ISA cards,
where you always leave the jumper set to ``disable''
unless you have a boot PROM.
These cards should be about the same speed as the same bus
width WD80x3, but turn out to be actually a bit slower.
These shared-memory ethercards also have a
programmed I/O mode that doesn't use the 8390
facilities (their engineers found too many bugs!)
The Linux 3c503 driver can also work with the 3c503
in programmed-I/O mode, but this is slower and less
reliable than shared memory mode. Also, programmed-I/O
mode is not as well tested when updating the drivers.
You shouldn't use the programmed-I/O mode
unless you need it for compatibility with another
operating system that is used on the same computer.
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. Note that `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.
Etherlink Plus 3c505
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.
Etherlink-16 3c507
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: 3c507
This card uses one of the Intel chips, and the
development of the driver is closely related to
the development of the Intel Ether Express driver.
The driver is included in the standard kernel
release, but as an alpha driver.
See
Alpha Drivers for important
information on using alpha-test ethernet drivers
with Linux.
Etherlink III, 3c509 / 3c509B
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c509
This card was fairly inexpensive and had
good performance for an ISA non-bus-master design.
The drawbacks were that the original 3c509
required 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 had a small packet buffer
(4kB total, 2kB Rx, 2kB Tx), causing the driver to
occasionally drop a packet if interrupts were 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 if you turn off PnP entirely, you should exit the
utility and and then follow that with a hard
reset to ensure that the new settings take effect.
Some people ask about the ``Server or Workstation'' and ``Highest
Modem Speed'' settings presented in the DOS configuration utility.
These settings don't actually change any hardware settings, rather
they are only tuning hints to the DOS driver. The linux driver
does not need or use these hints. Also, DON'T enable EISA mode
on this ISA card unless you really have an EISA machine, or
you may end up needing to find an EISA machine just to get
your ISA card back into ISA mode!
The card with the lowest hardware ethernet address
will always end up being eth0 in a multiple ISA
3c509 configuration. This shouldn't matter
to anyone, except for those people who want to assign
a 6 byte hardware address to a particular interface.
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.
3c515
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c515
This is 3Com's ISA 100Mbps offering, codenamed ``CorkScrew''.
Note that you will never achieve full 100Mbps on an ISA bus.
3c523
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: 3c523
This MCA bus card uses the i82586, and Chris Beauregard
has modified the ni52 driver to work with these cards.
3c527 Etherlink MC/32
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: 3c527
Yes, another i82586 MCA card. No, not too much interest in it.
Better chances with the 3c529 if you are stuck with MCA,
since it uses the tried and true 3c509 core.
3c529
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c509
This card actually uses the same chipset as the 3c509.
People have actually been using this card in MCA machines.
3c339 Token Ring PCI Velocity XL
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: tmspci
Token ring driver updates can be found at:
http://www.linuxtr.net/download.html
3c556
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c59x
A mini PCI NIC found on various IBM and HP notebooks.
Also knownas a `laptop tornado'.
3c562
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c589_cs
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.
Thanks again to Cameron for getting a sample unit and
documentation sent off to David Hinds.
3c575
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c59x
Note that to support this Cardbus device in old 2.2 kernels,
you had to use 3c575_cb.c from the pcmcia_cs package.
3c579
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c509
The EISA version of the 509. The current EISA version
uses the same 16 bit wide chip rather than a 32 bit
interface, so the performance increase isn't stunning.
Make sure the card is configured for EISA addressing mode.
Read the above 3c509 section for info on the driver.
3c589 / 3c589B
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: 3c589_cs
Many people have been using this PCMCIA card for quite some time
now. The "B" in the name means the same here as it does for
the 3c509 case.
3c590 / 3c595
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c59x
These ``Vortex'' cards are for PCI bus machines, with the '590
being 10Mbps and the '595 being 3Com's 100Mbs offering.
Also note that you can run the '595 as a '590 (i.e. in a 10Mbps mode).
The 3c59x line was replaced by the 3c9xx line quite some time ago,
and so these cards are considered rather old.
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. The 3c595 cards have 64kB,
as you can't get away with only 8kB RAM at 100Mbps!
3c592 / 3c597
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c59x
These are the EISA versions of the 3c59x
series of cards. The 3c592/3c597 (aka Demon) should work with
the vortex driver discussed above.
3c900 / 3c905 / 3c905B / 3c905C / 3c905CX
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,
with some additional support added to the vortex/3c59x driver.
The driver found in older kernels may not support the latest
revision(s) of these cards, so you may need a driver update.
Note that the 3c905C has support for TCP/UDP/IP checksumming
in hardware support - meaning less work for the computer
CPU to do!
3c985 (Gigabit acenic, aka Tigon2)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: acenic
This driver supports several other Gigabit cards in
addition to the 3Com model.
3c996 (Gigabit broadcom, aka Tigon3)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: tg3, bcm5700(old)
This driver supports several other Gigabit cards in
addition to the 3Com model. The tg3 driver is a
complete rewrite by several linux developers in an effort
to improve on the vendor supplied bcm5700 driver.
Accton MPX
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne (+8390)
Don't let the name fool you. This is still supposed to be a
NE2000 compatible card, and should work with the ne2000 driver.
Accton EN1203, EN1207, EtherDuo-PCI
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip, OR 8139too
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.
Accton EN2209 Parallel Port Adaptor (EtherPocket)
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ?
A driver for these parallel port adapters was available
around the time of the 2.0 or 2.1 kernel. It's last known
location was:
http://www.unix-ag.uni-siegen.de/~nils/accton_linux.html
Accton EN2212 PCMCIA Card
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet_cs
Note that some of the older Adaptec 32 bit boards used a tulip
clone.
Adaptec DuraLAN/Starfire, 64bit ANA-6922
Status: Supported, Driver Name: starfire
AT1500
Status: Supported, Driver Name: lance
These are a series of low-cost ethercards using the 79C960 version
of the AMD LANCE. These are bus-master cards, and hence one of
the faster ISA bus ethercards available.
DMA selection and chip numbering information can be found in
AMD LANCE.
AT1700
Status: Supported, Driver Name: at1700
Note that to access this driver during make config
you still have to answer `Y' when asked ``Prompt for
development and/or incomplete code/drivers?'' at
the first. This is simply due to lack of feedback on the
driver stability due to it being a relatively rare card.
If you have problems with the driver that ships with
the kernel then you may be interested in the alternative
driver available at:
http://www.cc.hit-u.ac.jp/nagoya/at1700/
The Allied Telesis AT1700 series ethercards are based
on the Fujitsu MB86965. This chip uses a programmed
I/O interface, and a pair of fixed-size transmit
buffers. This allows small groups of packets to
be sent back-to-back, with a short pause while
switching buffers.
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.
AT2400
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne, ne2k-pci (+8390)
Yet another PCI NE2000 clone card. This one is based on
the RealTek 8029 chip.
AT2450
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
This is the PCI version of the AT1500, and it doesn't suffer
from the problems that the Boca 79c970 PCI card does.
DMA selection and chip numbering information can be found in
AMD LANCE.
AT2500
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 8139too, rtl8139(old)
This card uses the RealTek 8139 chip - see the
section
RealTek 8139.
AT2540FX
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: eepro100
This card uses the i82557 chip, and hence may/should work
with the eepro100 driver. If you try this please send in
a report so this information can be updated.
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.
AMD LANCE (7990, 79C960/961/961A, PCnet-ISA)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: lance
There really is no AMD ethernet card. You are probably reading this
because the only markings you could find on your card said AMD
and the above number. The 7990 is the original `LANCE' chip,
but most stuff (including this document) refer to all these
similar chips as `LANCE' chips. (...incorrectly, I might add.)
These above numbers refer to chips from AMD
that are the heart of many ethernet cards.
For example, the Allied Telesis AT1500 (see
AT1500) and the NE1500/2100 (see
NE1500) use these chips.
The 7990/79c90 have long been replaced by newer versions.
The 79C960 (a.k.a. PCnet-ISA) essentially contains the 79c90
core, along with all the other hardware support required, which
allows a single-chip ethernet solution. The 79c961 (PCnet-ISA+)
is a jumperless Plug and Play version of the '960. The final
chip in the ISA series is the 79c961A (PCnet-ISA II), which
adds full duplex capabilities.
All cards with one of these chips should work with
the lance.c driver, with the exception of very old cards that
used the original 7990 in a shared memory configuration. These
old cards can be spotted by the lack of jumpers for a DMA channel.
One common problem people have is the `busmaster arbitration
failure' message. This is printed out when the LANCE driver
can't get access to the bus after a reasonable amount of time
has elapsed (50us). This usually indicates that the motherboard
implementation of bus-mastering DMA is broken, or some other device
is hogging the bus, or there is a DMA channel conflict. If your BIOS
setup has the `GAT option' (for Guaranteed Access Time) then try
toggling/altering that setting to see if it helps.
Also note that the driver only looks at the addresses:
0x300, 0x320, 0x340, 0x360 for a valid card, and any
address supplied by an ether= boot argument is silently
ignored (this will be fixed) so make sure your card is configured
for one of the above I/O addresses for now.
The driver will still work fine, even
if more than 16MB of memory is installed, since low-memory
`bounce-buffers' are used when needed (i.e. any data from
above 16MB is copied into a buffer below 16MB before being
given to the card to transmit.)
The DMA channel can be set with the low bits
of the otherwise-unused dev->mem_start value (a.k.a. PARAM_1).
(see
PARAM_1)
If unset it is probed for by enabling each free DMA channel
in turn and checking if initialization succeeds.
The HP-J2405A board is an exception: with this board it's easy
to read the EEPROM-set values for the IRQ, and DMA.
AMD 79C901 (Home PNA PHY)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: sis900
The sis900.txt file in 2.4 kernels states that
"AM79C901 HomePNA PHY is not thoroughly tested, there may
be some bugs in the "on the fly" change of transceiver."
so you may want to check that if using a newer kernel.
AMD 79C965 (PCnet-32)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
This is the PCnet-32 -- a 32 bit bus-master version of the
original LANCE chip for VL-bus and local bus systems.
chip. While these chips can be operated with the standard
lance.c driver, a 32 bit version (pcnet32.c) is
also available that does not have to concern itself with
any 16MB limitations associated with the ISA bus.
AMD 79C970/970A (PCnet-PCI)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
This is the PCnet-PCI -- similar to the PCnet-32, but designed
for PCI bus based systems. Please see the
above PCnet-32 information.
This means that you need to build a kernel with
PCI BIOS support enabled. The '970A adds full duplex support
along with some other features to the original '970 design.
Note that the Boca implementation of the 79C970 fails on
fast Pentium machines. This is a hardware problem, as it
affects DOS users as well. See the Boca section for more
details.
AMD 79C971 (PCnet-FAST)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
This is AMD's 100Mbit chip for PCI systems, which also supports
full duplex operation. It was introduced in June 1996.
AMD 79C972 (PCnet-FAST+)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
This has been confirmed to work just like the '971.
AMD 79C974 (PCnet-SCSI)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
This is the PCnet-SCSI -- which is basically treated like
a '970 from an Ethernet point of view.
Also see the above information. Don't ask how well the
SCSI half of the chip is supported -- this is the
Ethernet-HowTo, not the SCSI-HowTo.
AC3200 EISA
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ac3200
This EISA bus card is based on the common 8390
chip used in the ne2000 and wd80x3 cards.
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.
Feedback has been low even though the driver has
been in the kernel since v1.1.25.
Apricot Xen-II On Board Ethernet
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: apricot
This on board ethernet uses an i82596 bus-master chip.
It can only be at I/O address 0x300.
By looking at the driver source,
it appears that the IRQ is also hardwired to 10.
Earlier versions of the driver had a tendency to think
that anything living at 0x300 was an apricot NIC.
Since then the hardware address is checked to avoid these
false detections.
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!
Yes, they make more than just multi-port serial cards.
Boca BEN400
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne (+8390)
Apparently this is a NE2000 clone, using a VIA VT86C916 chip.
Boca BEN (ISA, VLB, PCI)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: lance, pcnet32
These cards are based on AMD's PCnet chips.
Many people reported endless problems with these VLB/PCI cards.
The problem was supposedly due to Boca not installing
some capacitors that AMD recommended.
(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 helped some. The
cards are so old now that it wouldn't be worth pursuing.
More general information on the AMD chips can be found in
AMD LANCE.
Broadcom Tigon2
Status: Supported, Driver Name: acenic
Broadcom Tigon3
Status: Supported, Driver Name: tg3
Lack of programming information from Cabletron at the time
drivers were being developed for these cards meant that
the drivers were not supported as well as they could have been.
Apparently Cabletron has since changed their policy with respect
to programming information (like Xircom).
However, at this point in time, there is little demand for
modified/updated drivers for the old E20xx and E21xx cards.
E10**, E10**-x, E20**, E20**-x
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ne (+8390)
These are NEx000 almost-clones that are reported to
work with the standard NEx000 drivers, thanks to a
ctron-specific check during the probe.
E2100
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: e2100 (+8390)
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/modules.conf 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.
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.
E22**
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: lance
According to information in a Cabletron Tech Bulletin, these
cards use the standard AMD PC-Net chipset (see
AMD PC-Net) and should work with the generic lance
driver.
EM100-ISA/EISA
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: smc9194
These cards use the SMC 91c100 chip and may work with the
SMC 91c92 driver, but this has yet to be verified.
Cogent eMASTER+, EM100-PCI, EM400, EM960, EM964
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
These are yet another DEC 21040 implementation that should
hopefully work fine with the standard 21040 driver.
The EM400 and the EM964 are four port cards using a
DEC 21050 bridge and 4 21040 chips.
See
DEC 21040
for more information on these cards, and the present driver
situation.
Compaq aren't really in the business of making ethernet
cards, but a lot of their systems have embedded ethernet
controllers on the motherboard.
Compaq Deskpro / Compaq XL (Embedded AMD Chip)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
Machines such as the XL series have an AMD 79c97x PCI chip
on the mainboard that can be used with the standard LANCE
driver. But before you can use it, you have to do some
trickery to get the PCI BIOS to a place where Linux can
see it. Frank Maas was kind enough to provide the
details:
`` The problem with this Compaq machine however is that the PCI
directory is loaded in high memory, at a spot where the Linux
kernel can't (won't) reach. Result: the card is never detected nor
is it usable (sideline: the mouse won't work either)
The workaround (as described thoroughly in
http://www-c724.uibk.ac.at/XL/)
is to load MS-DOS, launch a little driver Compaq wrote and then
load the Linux kernel using LOADLIN. Ok, I'll give you time to
say `yuck, yuck', but for now this is the only working solution
I know of. The little driver simply moves the PCI directory to
a place where it is normally stored (and where Linux can find it).''
The DOS utility movepci.exe is apparently in Compaq's
support package SP1599.EXE if you still need it.
More general information on the AMD chips can be found in
AMD LANCE.
Compaq Nettelligent/NetFlex (Embedded ThunderLAN Chip)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: tlan
These systems use a Texas Instruments ThunderLAN chip
Information on the ThunderLAN driver can be found in
ThunderLAN.
Compaq PCI card
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.
Danpex EN9400
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
Yet another card based on the DEC 21040 chip, reported to
work fine, and at a relatively cheap price.
See
DEC 21040
for more information on these cards, and the present driver
situation.
Davicom DM9102
Status: Supported, Driver Name: tulip, dmfe
This is an almost clone of the tulip chip and so you
can use the tulip driver or the vendor supplied dmfe driver.
Usual advice is to try tulip first, and then try dmfe.
Apparently dmfe is only better for very very old cards.
DE-100, DE-200, DE-220-T, DE-250
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne (+8390)
Some of the early D-Link cards didn't have the 0x57
PROM signature, but the ne2000 driver knows about them.
For the software configurable cards, you can get the
config program from www.dlink.com.
Note that there are also cards from
Digital (DEC) that are also named DE100 and DE200,
but the similarity stops there.
DE-520
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
This is a PCI card using the PCI version of AMD's LANCE chip.
DMA selection and chip numbering information can be found in
AMD LANCE.
DE-528
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ne, ne2k-pci (+8390)
Apparently D-Link have also started making PCI NE2000 clones.
DE-530
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
This is a generic DEC 21040 PCI chip implementation,
and is reported to work with the generic 21040 tulip driver.
Note that this is NOT the DFE-530.
See
DEC 21040
for more information on these cards, and the present driver
situation.
DE-600
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de600
The DE600 is an old parallel port ethernet
adaptor made for laptop users etc.
Expect about 180kb/s transfer speed from this device.
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.
DE-620
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de620
Similar to the the DE-600, only with two output formats.
See the above information on the DE-600.
DE-650
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet_cs
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.
DFE-530TX
Status Supported, Driver Name: via-rhine
Another card using the VIA Rhine chipset.
Newer cards use the Rhine-II.
(see
VIA Rhine)
Don't confuse this with the DE-530 which is a tulip
based card, or the DFE-530+ which is an 8139.
DFE-530TX+, DFE-538TX
Status Supported, Driver Name: 8139too, rtl8139(old)
This card uses the RealTek 8139 chip - see the
section
RealTek 8139.
DFE-550TX
Status Supported, Driver Name: sundance
DFE-570TX
Status Supported, Driver Name: tulip
This is a four port tulip (DS21143) card.
DFE-580TX
Status Supported, Driver Name: sundance
DGE-500T
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ns83820
DGE-550T
Status Supported, Driver Name: dl2k
DFINET-300 and DFINET-400
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.)
DEPCA, DE100/1, DE200/1/2, DE210, DE422
Status: Supported, Driver Name: depca
There is documentation included in the source file
`depca.c', which includes info on how to use more than
one of these cards in a machine. Note that the DE422 is
an EISA card. These cards are all based on the AMD LANCE chip.
See
AMD LANCE for more info.
A maximum of two of the ISA cards can be used, because they
can only be set for 0x300 and 0x200 base I/O address.
If you are intending to do this, please read the notes in
the driver source file depca.c in the standard kernel
source tree.
This driver will also work on Alpha CPU based machines, and
there are various ioctl()s that the user can play with.
Digital EtherWorks 3 (DE203, DE204, DE205)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: ewrk3
These cards use a proprietary
chip from DEC, as opposed to the LANCE chip used in the
earlier cards like the DE200. These cards support both shared
memory or programmed I/O, although you take about a 50%performance hit if you use PIO mode. The shared memory size can
be set to 2kB, 32kB or 64kB, but only 2 and 32 have been tested
with this driver. David says that the performance is virtually
identical between the 2kB and 32kB mode. There is more information
(including using the driver as a loadable module) at the top
of the driver file ewrk3.c and also in README.ewrk3.
Both of these files come with the standard kernel distribution.
This driver has Alpha CPU support like depca.c does.
The standard driver has a number
of interesting ioctl() calls that can be used to get or clear
packet statistics, read/write the EEPROM, change the
hardware address, and the like. Hackers can see the source
code for more info on that one.
David has also written a configuration utility for this
card (along the lines of the DOS program NICSETUP.EXE)
along with other tools. These can be found on
most Linux FTP sites in the directory
/pub/Linux/system/Network/management -- look for the
file ewrk3tools-X.XX.tar.gz.
DE425 EISA, DE434, DE435, DE500
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
These cards are based on the 21040 chip mentioned below.
The DE500 uses the 21140 chip to provide 10/100Mbs
ethernet connections.
Have a read of the 21040 section below for extra info.
There are also some compile-time options available for
non-DEC cards using this driver. Have a look at
README.de4x5 for details.
All the Digital cards will autoprobe for their media (except,
temporarily, the DE500 due to a patent issue).
This driver is also Alpha CPU ready and supports being loaded
as a module. Users can access the driver internals through
ioctl() calls - see the 'ewrk3' tools and the de4x5.c sources
for information about how to do this.
DEC 21040, 21041, 2114x, Tulip
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
The DEC 21040 is a bus-mastering single chip ethernet solution
from Digital, similar to AMD's PCnet chip. The 21040 is
specifically designed for the PCI bus architecture.
Apparently these chips are no longer being produced, as Intel
has bought the semiconductor portion of DEC and is favouring
their own ethernet chip(s).
You have a choice of two drivers for cards based on this
chip. There is the DE425 driver discussed above, and the
generic 21040 `tulip' driver.
Warning: Even though your card may be based upon this chip,
the drivers may not work for you. David C. Davies writes:
``There are no guarantees that either `tulip.c' OR `de4x5.c'
will run any DC2114x based card other than those they've been
written to support. WHY?? You ask. Because there is a register,
the General Purpose Register (CSR12) that (1) in the DC21140A is
programmable by each vendor and they all do it differently
(2) in the DC21142/3 this is now an SIA control register
(a la DC21041). The only small ray of hope is that we can decode the
SROM to help set up the driver. However, this is not a guaranteed
solution since some vendors (e.g. SMC 9332 card) don't follow the
Digital Semiconductor recommended SROM programming format."
In non-technical terms, this means that if you aren't sure that an
unknown card with a DC2114x chip will work with the linux driver(s),
then make sure you can return the card to the place of
purchase before you pay for it.
The 21041 chip is also found in place of the 21040
on most of the later SMC EtherPower cards.
The 21140 is for supporting 100Base-T and
works with the Linux drivers for the 21040 chip.
To use David's de4x5 driver with non-DEC cards, have a
look at README.de4x5 for details.
If you are having trouble with the tulip driver,
you can try the newest version from Donald's ftp/WWW
site.
Tulip Driver
There is also a (non-exhaustive) list of
various cards/vendors that use the 21040 chip.
Farallon sells EtherWave adaptors and transceivers. This device
allows multiple 10baseT devices to be daisy-chained.
Farallon Etherwave
Status: Supported, Driver Name: 3c509
This is reported to be a 3c509 clone that includes the
EtherWave transceiver. People have used these successfully
with Linux and the present 3c509 driver. They are too expensive
for general use, but are a great option for special cases. Hublet
prices start at $125, and Etherwave
adds $75-$100 to the price of the board -- worth
it if you have pulled one wire too few, but not if you are two
network drops short.
Farallon PCI 593
Status: Supported, Driver Name: de4x5, tulip
It has been reported that this card was detected with
the de4x5 driver.
Unlike many network chip manufacturers, Fujitsu have also
made and sold some network cards based upon their chip.
Fujitsu FMV-181/182/183/184
Status: Supported, Driver Name: at1700, fmv18x(old)
According to the driver, these cards are a straight forward
Fujitsu MB86965 implementation, which would make them
very similar to the Allied Telesis AT1700 cards.
Older kernels used the driver fmv18x but support for
these cards was added to the at1700 driver and so
the former has been phased out.
HP Night Director+ 10/100
Status: Supported, Driver Name: pcnet32
Apparently these cards use the AMD 79C972 chip.
27245A
Status: Supported, Driver Name: hp (+8390)
8 bit 8390 based 10BaseT, not recommended for all the
8 bit reasons.
HP EtherTwist, PC Lan+ (27247, 27248, 27252A, 27269B)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: hp+ (+8390)
The HP PC Lan+ is different to the standard HP PC Lan
card. It can be operated in either a PIO mode like a ne2000,
or a shared memory mode like a wd8013.
HP-J2405A
Status: Supported, Driver Name: lance
These are lower priced, and slightly faster than the
27247/27252A, but are missing some features, such
as AUI, ThinLAN connectivity, and boot PROM socket.
This is a fairly generic LANCE design, but a minor
design decision makes it incompatible with a generic
`NE2100' driver. Special support for it (including
reading the DMA channel from the board) is included
thanks to information provided by HP's Glenn
Talbott.
HP-Vectra On Board Ethernet
Status: Supported, Driver Name: lance
The HP-Vectra has an AMD PCnet chip on the motherboard.
DMA selection and chip numbering information can be found in
AMD LANCE.
HP 10/100 VG Any Lan Cards (27248B, J2573, J2577, J2585, J970, J973)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: hp100
This driver also supports some of the Compex VG products.
Since the driver supports ISA, EISA and PCI cards, it
is found under ISA cards when running make config
on a kernel source.
HP NetServer 10/100TX PCI (D5013A)
Status: Supported, Driver Name: eepro100
Apparently these are just a rebadged Intel EtherExpress Pro
10/100B card. See the Intel section for more information.
IBM Thinkpad 300
Status: Obsolete, Driver Name: znet
This is intel i82593 based. It has been declared obsolete
in the 2.4 series kernels.
IBM Credit Card Adaptor for Ethernet
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: pcnet_cs
IBM 10/100 EtherJet PCI
Status: Supported, Driver Name: eepro100
This card is reported to be compatible with the Intel
EtherExpress Pro 100 driver.
IBM Token Ring
Status: Semi-Supported, Driver Name: ibmtr
To support token ring
requires more than only writing a device driver, it also requires
writing the source routing routines for token ring. It is the
source routing that would be the most time comsuming to write.
Initial driver development was done with IBM ISA and
MCA token ring cards, and tested on an MCA 16/4 Megabit Token
Ring board, but it should work with other Tropic based boards.
ICL EtherTeam 16i/32
Status: Supported, Driver Name: eth16i
This driver supports both the ISA (16i) and EISA (32) versions
of the card. It uses the Fujitsu MB86965 chip that is also
used on the at1700 cards.
Note that the naming of the various Intel cards is ambiguous
and confusing at best. If in doubt, then check the i8xxxx
number on the main chip on the card or for PCI cards, use the
PCI information in the /proc directory and then
compare that to the numbers listed here. Finally, there was
a page at http://support.intel.com in the network area that
may also be some help if you don't know what card you have.
Ether Express
Status: Supported, Driver Name: eexpress
This card uses the intel i82586.
Earlier versions of this driver (in v1.2 kernels) were
classed as alpha-test, as it didn't work we
