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Date:      Sun, 4 Jan 1998 20:44:35 -0500
From:      Randall Hopper <rhh@ct.picker.com>
To:        Kapil Chowksey <kchowksey@hss.hns.com>
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Slow lnc0 Solved (was Re: (?) lnc0: Transmit underflow error -- Resetting)
Message-ID:  <19980104204435.18522@ct.picker.com>
In-Reply-To: <19971223230921.57532@netwalk.com>; from abc@netwalk.com on Tue, Dec 23, 1997 at 11:09:21PM -0500
References:  <19971223230921.57532@netwalk.com>

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Kapil Chowksey:
 |Randall Hopper:
 | |I'm trying to do transfers of a large amount of data between my FreeBSD
 | |3.0-971208-SNAP box with a NE2100 Lance card and a Linux 2.0.32 box with an
 | |NE2000.
 | |
 | |My effective transfer rate is measely 1.6kbytes per second over a 10Mbps
 | |ethernet with FTP, and I'm getting loads of these in the FreeBSD error log:
 |
 |Ditto here. I have a PCI based NE2100 card (lnc1) on an HP Vectra
 |pentium 200Mhz class PC which gives equally pathetic performance (both
 |under 2.2.5-RELEASE and 3.0-971208-SNAP) while ftp'ing to any other
 |host (Solaris, HPUX, EtherExpress Linux's, ed0 based FreeBSDs).
 |
 |It seems that packet sizes greater than 738 get delayed by 1-2 seconds
 |in the driver itself !

After chasing this one a while, I narrowed the culprit down to one of the
settings in my Award BIOS:  

     CHIPSET GLOBAL FEATURES

Anybody know more specifically what this option selects?

Flipping this from ENABLED to DISABLED did the trick.  When ENABLED, my NIC
yields 1.5-16 KBytes/sec transfer rate.  When DISABLED, it gives the 
1100 KBytes/sec it's supposed to.

I had this enabled since it was enabled by default in prior P55T2P4 Award
BIOS versions and ASUS docs.  I note that it is now disabled in the 205
BIOS rev. defaults.

Probably something to due with DMA as:  I see this slowdown in multiple OSs,
an NE2000 clone (IRQ, no DMA) works fine in the same slot on the same IRQ
(multiple OSs), and I found a DejaNews post of a Gravis Ultrasound owner
failing to get Ultrasound DMA working unless this this option was disabled.

(For the archives, my NIC is an Allied Telesyn AT1500 PCnet-ISA (79C960)
Bus-mastering ISA card.  Configuration: 0x300-0x317 irq 12 drq 7 on isa)

Thanks in advance for any enlightenment.

Randall Hopper




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