Re: RTL 8139 Problems - seems to be an old one .....

[Christoph Plattner <christoph.plattner@alcatel.at>]

Hi !

1)
	Errormessage like 'BOOTP block to big' does not come from
	etherboot itself (I also searched it with grep, but could not
	find it), it is a`part of the nbi-linux loader (first-linux.S).
	I think this error has nothing to do with the fact, that the
	booting hangs. 

2)	The nbgrub image can be booted with another nic !

1+2)	The machine cannot continue executing the code  - in one
	case it hangs, in the other case it reboots. The reason can
	be the same.

3)	As far as I know, the RTL8139A is on the board (OvisLink,
	homepage ` http://www.ovislink.com.tw/products.htm '
	The card is quite new (I bought it for 3 Months) and has modern
	features like wake-on-lan (I do not use it).

4)	Nearly all of my EPROM Chips are 150ns Chips (`-15'). I don't
	think, that this is the Problem, as the ertherboot software
	starts.....

As I mentioned in the last mail, the nic works with the etherboot
drivers
imbedded in GRUB (booted from floppy). Why does the 'booting' crash....
?

With friendly regards

	Christoph Plattner

PS: What with the bug concerning the NE and NE/PCI probing ? The hang
	<1> when no NE2000 card is found -> problem in GRUB

	<2> on my RTL8029A (Ovislink again) NE2000/PCI probe hungs
	at the end of the first pio_write call (in the while-loop).


Klaus Espenlaub wrote:
> 
> Christoph Plattner wrote:
> >
> > I tried to use the OvisLink card with the Realtek 8139 the frist
> > time with 'etherboot'. And it does not work. If I try to boot Linux,
> > it first interrupt the download with an error 'BOOTP block to big',
> > or something like that, then it continues loading, but hangs then
> > completely.
> 
> Can you quote the precise error message?  I couldn't find an error
> message in the BOOTP code that looks sufficiently similar to the one
> above.  In fact there isn't much that can fail.
> 
> Because this seems to be a weird problem, using a network sniffer might
> give a hint where the problem really is.
> 
> > If I try to boot the 'nbgrub' image, than the machine reboots after
> > loading the image.
> 
> Did this image work using some other card?  Could be a broken image -
> is it really a NBI image????
> 
> > I read some mails in the mailing list archive about this nic.
> > Some problems concerning the PS/2 mouse I found. The board has a
> > PS/2 mouse interface, but no PS/2 mouse were connencted (boards
> > I tried: ASUS PVI-486SP3 with DX/4-100 and a Gigabyte ATE/P with a
> > Pentium 100MHz).
> 
> The mouse interface should be irrelevant for etherboot working or not.
> It would surprise me if this is not the case.
> 
> > In an other mail I read, that the rtl8139.tmp must be < 32KB. Why ?
> > In my case it has nearly 61-62KB and no special option is used.
> > The only thing I try is the serial console, but also without, I have
> > the same effect. Also the -DNO_DHCP.... has not improved the thing.
> 
> Did you misunderstand the section in the docs concering the size of the
> ROM image or is it misleasding?  The correct way to get the size of an
> image is the "size" tool shipped with the binutils.  The number listed
> in the 'dec' column must be below 32K (minus some space for the BIOS -
> usually 1-2K - and the stack - usually 1-2K).  My rtl8139.tmp uses 88798
> bytes on the disc, but only contains a 24201 byte ROM image.  The rest is
> symbol tables, debugging info and so on.  This doesn't get included in the
> ROM image.  But as the ROMs are usually compressed and the size AFTER
> decompression must be below 32K there is no easy way to guess the size
> from the compressed ROM file.
> 
> Anyway - if the ROM works it should print a line "ROM segment xxxx length
> yyyy reloc zzzz" - if the length printed is above 16K and below 32K
> everything should be fine.
> 
> > The ROM image has 16KB and I used some different EPROM chips:
> > AMD, intel, SGS Thomson, NMC, etc... (27c128 and 27c256)
> > Some of them fail in the Pentium board, all of them work in the
> > 486 board, but in all cases I have the effects described above.
> 
> This seems to indicate that 486 chipsets tend to use slower accesses
> to the ROM image, making slower ROMs work.  It might help if you have a
> closer look at the types and access speeds of the ROMs failing to work
> in Pentium machines - especially the number after the dash is interesting.
> Someone suggested that a hardware compatibility database should be collected
> trough a web interface and this
> 
> > When I boot GRUB from disk, the etherboot driver included in the
> > GRUB package work well for the RTL8139 (not for the RTL8029, as
> > described in my last bug report concerningthe probing).
> 
> How old is the card?  What chip revision is on the card (most likely an
> original RTL8139 or at most a RTL8139A)?
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> Klaus Espenlaub <espenlaub@informatik.uni-ulm.de>
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