Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 14:40:58 -0600 (MDT) From: Douglas Russell <russelld@cpsc.ucalgary.ca> To: Scott Johnson <srj@nsd.3com.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 3c509-TP, also sysinstall Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.960408141137.15550A-100000@fsb> In-Reply-To: <199604031820.AA27664@orodruin.NSD.3Com.COM>
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On Wed, 3 Apr 1996, Scott Johnson wrote: > Doug> On the other machines, it works under Windows, even > Doug> without an IRQ specified, but FreeBSD won't find it. > > It's possible that the Windows 95 driver for the 486 is reconfiguring > the card. The 3C509, I believe, has an onboard FLASH rom that you > configure with the 3C5x9cfg utility. Maybe Windows/95 is getting > overzealous and reconfiguring the card? Here's a thing to try. Get a > boot floppy (that only boots to DOS) and put the 3Com utility on it. > Boot Win/95 on the 486, verify that the 3c509 works. Boot from the > floppy, and configure the card. Boot FreeBSD (do NOT boot Win/95 > after configuring the card with the floppy) and see if it works. > > I have a hunch that Win/95 is reconfiguring the card after it probes > for it. It may do this without telling you. That's wny I had you put > together a boot floppy, so you could stay away from Win/95 while > running the config utility. Windows might be trying to be clever and > configuring a non-PnP card as if it was PnP. That was my first thought. I've still not uncovered whether it really does, or not. Here's what I've figured out / tried, since... I tried using the latest 3c5x9x utility to disable PnP altogether. It returns an error message, which leads me to believe that the card, indeed, does not support the 'real' PnP. (I don't think it's supposed to, as it isn't a 509b, it is a plain 3c509-TP.) I started getting curious as to what machines I could drop the thing into, and have FreeBSD recognise it. So far, only the P150 machine had found the card at all. Here's what I tried, organised my machine name, to make it easier to identify each machine: 486Quick150: This is the one which I was origionally trying, and didn't work. I tried re-configuring the card for several base/irq combinations, none of which FreeBSD found. However, booting up Windows virtually always found the card, regardless of what the driver was set to, and never showed an interupt. This seems to support that WIndows ras reconfiguring the card, but sometimes, say if I picked 210 as the io port, Windows wouldn't find the card if it was set to 300. Setting windows to 210 also, would make it work. I even tried all sorts of irq/io base numbers in FreeBSD (mismatching them from the card's), but that didn't work either. Hobbes: This machine is currently a 486DXL-40 (basically a clock-doubled 386-40, it goes in a 386 motherboard), running only FreeBSD. It's the one machine on the network that always runs FreeBSD so I can use it to store home directories, shared applications, etc. Again, I tried setting the card and FreeBSD to a myriad of values, some matching, some not... (including 300, 320, 210, with all sorts of IRQs, like 10 set on the card, try 10, 11, 12, on FreeBSD, try 11 on the card, try 10, 11, 12 in Freebsd...) Nothing seemed to work, and Windoes definetly isn't there to interfere. Hoser: This is friend's Pentium machine which worked. The card was set in the config utility to 300/11, FreeBSD found it at 300/10 (I never tried 300/11 in FreeBSD, it worked at the default..??), and W95 found it at 300/11. (Yes, it even showed the interrupt.) Bedroom: I was getting poor NFS performance on the machine in my Bedroom (a 486/33), so I decided to try the 509 in there. The card was configured at 210/10 when I put it in the machine, and FreeBSD actually found it, when set to 210/10. Unfortunately, performance was pathetic. Using TCPBLAST, I couldn't get over 0.0 MB/s.. :-) Watching the dots, it would move a chunk, anywhere from 2-3K to 20K or so, then pause... then move another. Same result as FTP with HASH turned on. So, I figured the interrupt wasn't right, causing it to WORK, but only after the driver timed out and checked the card for data, wondering why an interrupt hadn't occured yet. However, I never did find the correct interrupt, if that was the problem. Freebsd worked with the config utility set to 10/11 or 12 while the card was at 10. I tried different IO bases, interrupts, nothing gave better performance. IRQ 15 didn't work at all, even when the card and FreeBSD were both set to it. I found that curious. Even stranger, one time I went to 486Quick150, and tcpblasted Bedroom. I got 1.0 MBytes/s. Considering the top speed for ethernet is about 1.0, That's not too bad. Unfortunately, it only workes one way! Den: Acts exactly like 486Quick150. Different motherboard, different BIOS, different processor, hard drive controller, drives... Even different video card, but it does exactly the same thing. Does ANYONE have any ideas what is going on here? Is it possible that there is a bug in the software on the 3c509 itself? Can the whole card be re-programmed, or is just the setting memory flash-rom? Later...... <Doug>
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