*BSD News Article 7363


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Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!sgiblab!spool.mu.edu!agate!doc.ic.ac.uk!uknet!mcsun!chsun!Germany.EU.net!Urmel.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE!martin
From: martin@math.rwth-aachen.de (  Martin Schoenert)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: [386BSD] Problems with a SMC Elite16 (WD8013EPC)
Message-ID: <martin.720806663@bert>
Date: 3 Nov 92 16:04:23 GMT
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Organization: Rechnerbetrieb Informatik  /  RWTH Aachen
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I am having some problems with my network card.

The computer is a 486SX25 with 16MByte of main memory, a 100 MByte
Seagate IDE hard disk, and a ET4000 VGA card.  Neither the VGA card nor
the IDE controller use IRQ2, in fact as far as I can tell those cards
aren't even connected to IRQ2 (IRQ2 is pin B4, isn't it?).  The network
card is a SMC Elite16 (WD8013EPC).  It is jumpered for SOFT configuration
and configured for port 0x280, irq 2, iomem 0xd0000 with 'ezsetup'.  The
kernel, which is 386BSD version 0.1 with all patches from Terry Lambert's
patchkit 1 applied, looks for the network card under the same parameters.

Ok, here is what happens.  When I first boot the kernel it finds the
network card and reports it on irq 9.  I am not really an expert on those
things, but I recall that irq 2 is automatically translated to irq 9, so
this doesn't surprise me that much.  Anyhow everything works fine; I can
'ftp', mount remote file systems with 'nfs', etc.  Performance is also
quite good, 'ftp' achieves about 250 KByte / sec on the local area net
(performance was the reason to replace a NE2000 card that was originally
used; it worked without problems but achieved only 30 KByte / sec).

But if I reboot the machine the kernel doesn't find the network card any
more.  Then I boot a MS-DOS diskette (I hate doing that ;-) and start
'ezsetup'.  It is pretty confused, telling me that my card is a WD8003EP
(not a WD8013EPC).  So I change the configuration slightly, save it and
exit 'ezsetup' again.  Then I start 'ezsetup' again.  This time it
correctly recognizes my card and lets me set the parameters to port
0x280, irq 2, and iomem 0xd0000 again.  After saving this configuration I
can now boot 386BSD and this time it finds the card again.

This is repeatable.  Shutting 386BSD down seems to leave the card in a
state of shock.  After reconfiguring and rebooting everything works fine
again until the next reboot.

I also recompiled the kernel to use irq 5/7/9 and the same thing happens
with those irq's.  So I thought that it is a matter of 386BSD storing
something strange in the configuration RAM, and that I should use one of
the HARD configuration options of the card.  The first one uses irq 3,
which is already taken by COM1, so I couldn't use this one.  The other
one uses irq 10 (port 0x300 and iomem 0xcc000).  I recompiled the kernel
to look at the right place and tried again.  This time the kernel finds
the card all right, but this is all that works.  If I try to 'ping'
another system I get a 'Rejected 65531' message.

Has anybody had the same problem?  Has anybody solved this problem?  How?

Martin.

PS.  All in all we are very pleased with 386BSD.  We had other minor
problems with the installation, but now everything works quite all right.

--
Martin Sch"onert,   Martin.Schoenert@Math.RWTH-Aachen.DE,  +49 241 804551
Lehrstuhl D f"ur Mathematik, Templergraben 64, RWTH, D 51 Aachen, Germany