Re: Question for LNE100TX and MX98715 Etherboot users

[Marty Connor <mdc@thinguin.org>]

On 3/1/2000 9:02 AM Michael Rendell michael@cs.mun.ca wrote:
>On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, mdc@thinguin.org wrote:
>>  I have done some more experimentation and have discoved that Tulip clones 
>>  vary widely in how much reset time they require.
>>  The LNE100TX and MX98715 seem to require an eternity after a 
>>     outl(0, ioaddr + CSR0); /* reset the card */
>>  before they are able to transmit again.

>I tried the code and it works (with the expected delay).

Great!  I'm glad it works for you!  I always found that 10 second delay 
to be irritating, especially once I knew the first packet was being 
dropped.

>Tp bad there isn't some sort of "ping test" that could be used
>to tell when the card was alive again (eg, ask it to do something
>and wait 'til it indicates it is done). Michael

That's the first thing I thought of when I was fixing this bug, and I am 
still considering it.  My thinking was that I could write and read back a 
register on the card until I got reliable information, and maybe that 
would tell me when the card was back to life.  What concerns me is that 
since we're dealing with so many different clones, I might not be able to 
count on this working on all cards.  Then too is the possibility that I 
could read and write registers while auto-negotiation is going on, and 
get a false positive indication.

Perhaps this weekend I'll play with it a bit.  I could always 
conditionalize the reset code so that the slow cards get more of a wait 
time after reset, and the faster cards are not slowed down.  A 7 second 
net savings on the BOOTP/TFTP time is good though, considering that the 
TFTP and BOOTP together take less than a second in most cases.

In any case, thanks Michael for your help in debugging this.  You have 
helped improve the lives of many MX98715 and LNE100TX users :-)

Thanks and Regards,

Marty

---
   Name: Martin D. Connor
US Mail: Entity Cyber, Inc.; P.O. Box 391827; Cambridge, MA 02139; USA
  Voice: (617) 491-6935, Fax: (617) 491-7046 
  Email: mdc@thinguin.org
    Web: http://www.thinguin.org/


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