Linux Ethernet-Howto
This is the Ethernet-Howto, which is a compilation of information about which ethernet devices can be used for Linux, and how to set them up. Note that this Howto is focused on the hardware and low level driver aspect of the ethernet cards, and does not cover the software end of things like ifconfig and route. See the Network Howto for that stuff.
The Ethernet-Howto covers what cards you should and shouldn't buy; how to set them up, how to run more than one, and other common problems and questions. It contains detailed information on the current level of support for all of the most common ethernet cards available.
It does not cover the software end of things, as that is covered in the NET-3 Howto. Also note that general non-Linux specific questions about Ethernet are not (or at least they should not be) answered here. For those types of questions, see the excellent amount of information in the comp.dcom.lans.ethernet FAQ. You can FTP it from rtfm.mit.edu just like all the other newsgroup FAQs.
This present revision covers distribution kernels up to and including 2.2.17.
The Ethernet-Howto is by:
Paul Gortmaker, p_gortmaker@yahoo.com
The primary source of information for the initial ASCII-only version of the Ethernet-Howto was:
Donald J. Becker, becker@scyld.com
who we should thank for writing a lot of the ethernet card drivers that are presently available for Linux. He also is the author of the original NFS server too. Thanks Donald!
This document is Copyright (c) 1993-2000 by Paul Gortmaker. Please see the Disclaimer and Copying information at the end of this document ( copyright) for information about redistribution of this document and the usual `we are not responsible for what you manage to break...' type legal stuff.
New versions of this document can be retrieved from:
Ethernet-HOWTO
or for those wishing to use FTP and/or get non-HTML formats:
Sunsite HOWTO Archive
This is the `official' location - it can also be found on various Linux WWW/ftp mirror sites. Updates will be made as new information and/or drivers becomes available. If this copy that you are reading is more than 6 months old, then you should check to see if an updated copy is available.
This document is available in various formats (postscript, dvi, ASCII, HTML, etc.). I would recommend viewing it in HTML (via a WWW browser) or the Postscript/dvi format. Both of these contain cross-references that are not included in the plain text ASCII format.
As this guide is getting bigger and bigger, you probably don't want to spend the rest of your afternoon reading the whole thing. And the good news is that you don't have to read it all. The HTML and Postscript/dvi versions have a table of contents which will really help you find what you need a lot faster.
Chances are you are reading this document beacuse you can't get things to work and you don't know what to do or check. The next section ( HELP - It doesn't work!) is aimed at newcomers to linux and will point you in the right direction.
Typically the same problems and questions are asked over and over again by different people. Chances are your specific problem or question is one of these Frequently Asked Questions, and is answered in the FAQ portion of this document . ( The FAQ section). Everybody should have a look through this section before posting for help.
If you haven't got an ethernet card, then you will want to start with deciding on a card. ( What card should I buy...)
If you have already got an ethernet card, but are not sure if you can use it with Linux, then you will want to read the section which contains specific information on each manufacturer, and their cards. ( Vendor Specific...)
If you are interested in some of the technical aspects of the Linux device drivers, then you can have a browse of the section with this type of information. ( Technical Information)
Okay, don't panic. This will lead you through the process of getting things working, even if you have no prior background in linux or ethernet hardware.
First thing you need to do is figure out what model your card is so you can determine if Linux has a driver for that particular card. Different cards typically have different ways of being controlled by the host computer, and the linux driver (if there is one) contains this control information in a format that allows linux to use the card. If you don't have any manuals or anything of the sort that tell you anything about the card model, then you can try the section on helping with mystery cards (reference section: Identifying an Unknown Card).
Now that you know what type of card you have, read through the details of your particular card in the card specific section (reference section: Vendor Specific...) which lists in alphabetical order, card manufacturers, individual model numbers and whether it has a linux driver or not. If it lists it as `Not Supported' you can pretty much give up here. If you can't find your card in that list, then check to see if your card manual lists it as being `compatible' with another known card type. For example there are hundreds, if not thousands of different cards made to be compatible with the original Novell NE2000 design.
Assuming you have found out that a linux driver exists for your card, you now have to find it and make use of it. Just because linux has a driver for your card does not mean that it is built into every kernel. (The kernel is the core operating system that is first loaded at boot, and contains drivers for various pieces of hardware, among other things.) Depending on who made the particular linux distribution you are using, there may be only a few pre-built kernels, and a whole bunch of drivers as smaller separate modules, or there may be a whole lot of kernels, covering a vast combination of built-in driver combinations.
Most linux distributions now ship with a bunch of small modules that are the various drivers. The required modules are typically loaded late in the boot process, or on-demand as a driver is needed to access a particualr device. You will need to attach this module to the kernel after it has booted up. See the information that came with your distribution on installing and using modules, along with the module section in this document. ( Using the Ethernet Drivers as Modules)
If you didn't find either a pre-built kernel with your driver, or a module form of the driver, chances are you have a typically uncommon card, and you will have to build your own kernel with that driver included. Once you have linux installed, building a custom kernel is not difficult at all. You essentially answer yes or no to what you want the kernel to contain, and then tell it to build it. There is a Kernel-!HowTo that will help you along.
At this point you should have somehow managed to be booting a kernel with your driver built in, or be loading it as a module. About half of the problems people have are related to not having driver loaded one way or another, so you may find things work now.
If it still doesn't work, then you need to verify that the kernel is indeed detecting the card. To do this, you need to type dmesg | more when logged in after the system has booted and all modules have been loaded. This will allow you to review the boot messages that the kernel scrolled up the screen during the boot process. If the card has been detected, you should see somewhere in that list a message from your card's driver that starts with eth0, mentions the driver name and the hardware parameters (interrupt setting, input/output port address, etc) that the card is set for. (Note: At boot, linux lists all the PCI cards installed in the system, regardless of what drivers are available - do not mistake this for the driver detection which comes later!)
If you don't see a driver indentification message like this, then the driver didn't detect your card, and that is why things aren't working. See the FAQ ( The FAQ Section) for what to do if your card is not detected. If you have a NE2000 compatible, there is also some NE2000 specific tips on getting a card detected in the FAQ section as well.
If the card is detected, but the detection message reports some sort of error, like a resource conflict, then the driver probably won't have initialized properly and the card still wont be useable. Most common error messages of this sort are also listed in the FAQ section, along with a solution.
If the detection message seems okay, then double check the card resources reported by the driver against those that the card is physically set for (either by little black jumpers on the card, or by a software utility supplied by the card manufacturer.) These must match exactly. For example, if you have the card jumpered or configured to IRQ 15 and the driver reports IRQ 10 in the boot messages, things will not work. The FAQ section discusses the most common cases of drivers incorrectly detecting the configuration information of various cards.
At this point, you have managed to get you card detected with all the correct parameters, and hopefully everything is working. If not, then you either have a software configuration error, or a hardware configuration error. A software configuration error is not setting up the right network addresses for the ifconfig and route commands, and details of how to do that are fully described in the Network !HowTo and the `Network Administrator's Guide' which both probably came on the CD-ROM you installed from.
A hardware configuration error is when some sort of resource conflict or mis-configuration (that the driver didn't detect at boot) stops the card from working properly. This typically can be observed in several different ways. (1) You get an error message when ifconfig tries to open the device for use, such as ``SIOCSFFLAGS: Try again''. (2) The driver reports eth0 error messages (viewed by dmesg | more) or strange inconsistencies for each time it tries to send or receive data. (3) Typing cat /proc/net/dev shows non-zero numbers in one of the errs, drop, fifo, frame or carrier columns for eth0. (4) Typing cat /proc/interrupts shows a zero interrupt count for the card. Most of the typical hardware configuration errors are also discussed in the FAQ section.
Well, if you have got to this point and things still aren't working, read the FAQ section of this document, read the vendor specific section detailing your particular card, and if it still doesn't work then you may have to resort to posting to an appropriate newsgroup for help. If you do post, please detail all relevant information in that post, such as the card brand, the kernel version, the driver boot messages, the output from cat /proc/net/dev, a clear description of the problem, and of course what you have already tried to do in an effort to get things to work.
You would be surprised at how many people post useless things like ``Can someone help me? My ethernet doesn't work.'' and nothing else. Readers of the newsgroups tend to ignore such silly posts, whereas a detailed and informational problem description may allow a `linux-guru' to spot your problem right away. Of course the same holds true when e-mailing a problem report - always provide as much information as possible.
The twisted pair cables, with the RJ-45 (giant phone jack) connectors is technically called 10BaseT. You may also hear it called UTP (Unsheilded Twisted Pair).
The thinnet, or thin ethernet cabling, (RG-58 coaxial cable) with the BNC (metal push and turn-to-lock) connectors is technically called 10Base2.
The older thick ethernet (10mm coaxial cable) which is only found in older installations is called 10Base5. The 15 pin D-shaped plug found on some ethernet cards (the AUI connector) is used to connect to thick ethernet and external transcievers.
Most ethercards also come in a `Combo' version for only $10-$20 more. These have both twisted pair and thinnet transceiver built-in, allowing you to change your mind later.
Most installations will use 10BaseT/100BaseT 10Base2 does not offer any upgrade path to 100Base-whatever. 10Base2 is fine for hobbyists setting up a home network when purchasing a hub is not desireable for some reason or another.
See Cables, Coax... for other concerns with different types of ethernet cable.
Here are some of the more frequently asked questions about using Linux with an Ethernet connection. Some of the more specific questions are sorted on a `per manufacturer basis'. Chances are the question you want an answer for has already been asked (and answered!) by someone else, so even if you don't find your answer here, you probably can find what you want from a news archive such as Dejanews.
The answer to this question depends heavily on exactly what you intend on doing with your net connection, and how much traffic it will see.
If you only expect a single user to be doing the occasional ftp session or WWW connection, then even an old 8 bit ISA card will probably keep you happy.
If you intend to set up a server, and you require the CPU overhead of moving data over the network to be kept to a minimum, you probably want to look at one of the PCI cards that uses a chip with bus-mastering capapbility, such as the DEC tulip (21xxx) chip, or the AMD PCnet-PCI chip.
If you fall somewhere in the middle of the above, then any one of the low cost PCI or 16 bit ISA cards with stable drivers will do the job for you.
I heard that there is an updated or preliminary/alpha driver available for my card. Where can I get it?
The newest of the `new' drivers can be found on Donald's ftp site: www.scyld.com in the /pub/linux/ area. Things change here quite frequently, so just look around for it. Alternatively, it may be easier to use a WWW browser on:
Don's Linux Home Page
to locate the driver that you are looking for. (Watch out for WWW browsers that silently munge the source by replacing TABs with spaces and so on - use ftp, or at least an FTP URL for downloading if unsure.)
Now, if it really is an alpha, or pre-alpha driver, then please treat it as such. In other words, don't complain because you can't figure out what to do with it. If you can't figure out how to install it, then you probably shouldn't be testing it. Also, if it brings your machine down, don't complain. Instead, send us a well documented bug report, or even better, a patch!
Note that some of the `useable' experimental/alpha drivers have been included in the standard kernel source tree. When running make config one of the first things you will be asked is whether to ``Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers''. You will have to answer `Y' here to get asked about including any alpha/experiemntal drivers.
What needs to be done so that Linux can run two ethernet cards?
The answer to this question depends on whether the driver(s) is/are being used as a loadable module or are compiled directly into the kernel. Most linux distributions use modular drivers now. This saves distributing lots of kernels, each with a different driver set built in. Instead a single basic kernel is used and the individual drivers that are need for a particular user's system are loaded once the system has booted far enough to access the driver module files (usually stored in /lib/modules/).
With the Driver as a Module: In the case of PCI drivers, the module will typically detect all of the installed cards of that brand model automatically. However, for ISA cards, probing for a card is not a safe operation, and hence you typically need to supply the I/O base address of the card so the module knows where to look. This information is stored in the file /etc/conf.modules.
As an example, consider a user that has two ISA NE2000 cards, one at 0x300 and one at 0x240 and what lines they would have in their /etc/conf.modules file:
alias eth0 ne alias eth1 ne options ne io=0x240,0x300
What this does: This says that if the administrator (or the kernel) does a modprobe eth0 or a modprobe eth1 then the ne.o driver should be loaded for either eth0 or eth1. Furthermore, when the ne.o module is loaded, it should be loaded with the options io=0x240,0x300 so that the driver knows where to look for the cards. Note that the 0x is important - things like 300h as commonly used in the DOS world won't work. Switching the order of the 0x240 and the 0x300 will switch which physical card ends up as eth0 and eth1.
Most of the ISA module drivers can take multiple comma separated I/O values like this example to handle multiple cards. However, some (older?) drivers, such as the 3c501.o module are currently only able to handle one card per module load. In this case you can load the module twice to get both cards detected. The /etc/conf.modules file in this case would look like:
alias eth0 3c501 alias eth1 3c501 options eth0 -o 3c501-0 io=0x280 irq=5 options eth1 -o 3c501-1 io=0x300 irq=7
In this example the -o option has been used to give each instance of the module a unique name, since you can't have two modules loaded with the same name. The irq= option has also been used to to specify the hardware IRQ setting of the card. (This method can also be used with modules that accept comma separated I/O values, but it is less efficient since the module ends up being loaded twice when it doesn't really need to be.)
As a final example, consider a user with one 3c503 card at 0x350 and one SMC Elite16 (wd8013) card at 0x280. They would have:
alias eth0 wd alias eth1 3c503 options wd io=0x280 options 3c503 io=0x350
For PCI cards, you typically only need the alias lines to correlate the ethN interfaces with the appropriate driver name, since the I/O base of a PCI card can be safely detected.
The available modules are typically stored in /lib/modules/`uname -r`/net where the uname -r command gives the kernel version (e.g. 2.0.34). You can look in there to see which one matches your card. Once you have the correct settings in your conf.modules file, you can test things out with:
modprobe ethN dmesg | tail
where `N' is the number of the ethernet interface you are testing.
With the Driver Compiled into the Kernel: If you have the driver compiled into the kernel, then the hooks for multiple ethercards are all there. However, note that at the moment only one ethercard is auto-probed for by default. This helps to avoid possible boot time hangs caused by probing sensitive cards.
(Note: As of late 2.1.x kernels, the boot probes have been sorted into safe and unsafe, so that all safe (e.g. PCI and EISA) probes will find all related cards automatically. Systems with more than one ethernet card with at least one of them being an ISA card will still need to do one of the following.)
There are two ways that you can enable auto-probing for the second (and third, and...) card. The easiest method is to pass boot-time arguments to the kernel, which is usually done by LILO. Probing for the second card can be achieved by using a boot-time argument as simple as ether=0,0,eth1. In this case eth0 and eth1 will be assigned in the order that the cards are found at boot. Say if you want the card at 0x300 to be eth0 and the card at 0x280 to be eth1 then you could use
LILO: linux ether=5,0x300,eth0 ether=15,0x280,eth1
The ether= command accepts more than the IRQ + I/O
Passing Ethernet Arguments... for the full syntax, card specific parameters, and LILO tips.
These boot time arguments can be made permanent so that you don't have to re-enter them every time. See the LILO configuration option `append' in the LILO manual.
The second way (not recommended) is to edit the file Space.c and replace the 0xffe0 entry for the I/O address with a zero. The 0xffe0 entry tells it not to probe for that device -- replacing it with a zero will enable autoprobing for that device.
As described above, the ether= command only works for drivers that are compiled into the kernel. Now most distributions use the drivers in a modular form, and so the ether= command is rarely used anymore. (Some older documentation has yet to be updated to reflect this change.) If you want to apply options for a modular ethernet driver you must make changes to the /etc/conf.modules file.
If you are using a compiled in driver, and have added an ether= to your LILO configuration file, note that it won't take effect until you re-run lilo to process the updated configuration file.
Problem: PCI NE2000 clone card is not detected at boot with v2.0.x.
Reason: The ne.c driver up to v2.0.30 only knows about the PCI ID number of !RealTek? 8029 based clone cards. Since then, several others have also released PCI NE2000 clone cards, with different PCI ID numbers, and hence the driver doesn't detect them.
Solution: The easiest solution is to upgrade to a v2.0.31 (or newer) version of the linux kernel. It knows the ID numbers of about five different NE2000-PCI chips, and will detect them automatically at boot or at module loading time. If you upgrade to 2.0.34 (or newer) there is a PCI-only specific NE2000 driver that is slightly smaller and more efficient than the original ISA/PCI driver.
Problem: PCI NE2000 clone card is reported as an ne1000 (8 bit card!) at boot or when I load the ne.o module for v2.0.x, and hence doesn't work.
Reason: Some PCI clones don't implement byte wide access (and hence are not truly 100% NE2000 compatible). This causes the probe to think they are NE1000 cards.
Solution: You need to upgrade to v2.0.31 (or newer) as described above. The driver(s) now check for this hardware bug.
Problem: PCI NE2000 card gets terrible performance, even when reducing the window size as described in the Performance Tips section.
Reason: The spec sheets for the original 8390 chip, desgined and sold over ten years ago, noted that a dummy read from the chip was required before each write operation for maximum reliablity. The driver has the facility to do this but it has been disabled by default since the v1.2 kernel days. One user has reported that re-enabling this `mis-feature' helped their performance with a cheap PCI NE2000 clone card.
Solution: Since it has only been reported as a solution by one person, don't get your hopes up. Re-enabling the read before write fix is done by simply editing the driver file in linux/drivers/net/, uncommenting the line containing NE_RW_BUGFIX and then rebuilding the kernel or module as appropriate. Please send an e-mail describing the performance difference and type of card/chip you have if this helps you. (The same can be done for the ne2k-pci.c driver as well).
Problem: The ne2k-pci.c driver reports error messages like timeout waiting for Tx RDC with a PCI NE2000 card and doesn't work right.
Reason: Your card and/or the card to PCI bus link can't handle the long word I/O optimization used in this driver.
Solution: Firstly, check the settings available in the BIOS/CMOS setup to see if any related to PCI bus timing are too aggressive for reliable operation. Otherwise using the ISA/PCI ne.c driver (or removing the #define USE_LONGIO from ne2k-pci.c) should let you use the card.
Probem: ISA Plug and Play NE2000 (such as !RealTek? 8019) is not detected.
Reason: The original NE2000 specification (and hence the linux NE2000 driver) does not have support for Plug and Play.
Solution: Use the DOS configuration disk that came with the card to disable PnP, and to set the card to a specified I/O address and IRQ. Add a line to /etc/conf.modules like options ne io=0xNNN where 0xNNN is the hex I/O address you set the card to. (This assumes you are using a modular driver; if not then use an ether=0,0xNNN,eth0 argument at boot). You may also have to enter the BIOS/CMOS setup and mark the IRQ as Legacy-ISA instead of PnP. Alternatively, if you need to leave PnP enabled for compatibility with some other operating system, then look into the isapnptools package. Try man isapnp to see if it is already installed on your system. If not, then have a look at the following URL:
ISA PNP Tools
Problem: NE*000 driver reports `not found (no reset ack)' during boot probe.
Reason: This is related to the above change. After the initial verification that an 8390 is at the probed I/O address, the reset is performed. When the card has completed the reset, it is supposed to acknowedge that the reset has completed. Your card doesn't, and so the driver assumes that no NE card is present.
Solution: You can tell the driver that you have a bad card by using an otherwise unused mem_end hexidecimal value of 0xbad at boot time. You have to also supply a non-zero I/O base for the card when using the 0xbad override. For example, a card that is at 0x340 that doesn't ack the reset would use something like:
LILO: linux ether=0,0x340,0,0xbad,eth0
This will allow the card detection to continue, even if your card doesn't ACK the reset. If you are using the driver as a module, then you can supply the option bad=0xbad just like you supply the I/O address.
Problem: NE*000 card hangs machine at first network access.
Reason: This problem has been reported for kernels as old as 1.1.57 to the present. It appears confined to a few software configurable clone cards. It appears that they expect to be initialized in some special way.
Solution: Several people have reported that running the supplied DOS software config program and/or the supplied DOS driver prior to warm booting (i.e. loadlin or the `three-finger-salute') into linux allowed the card to work. This would indicate that these cards need to be initialized in a particular fashion, slightly different than what the present Linux driver does.
Problem: NE*000 ethercard at 0x360 doesn't get detected.
Reason: Your NE2000 card is 0x20 wide in I/O space, which makes it hit the parallel port at 0x378. Other devices that could be there are the second floppy controller (if equipped) at 0x370 and the secondary IDE controller at 0x376--0x377. If the port(s) are already registered by another driver, the kernel will not let the probe happen.
Solution: Either move your card to an address like 0x280, 0x340, 0x320 or compile without parallel printer support.
Problem: Network `goes away' every time I print something (NE2000)
Reason: Same problem as above, but you have an older kernel that doesn't check for overlapping I/O regions. Use the same fix as above, and get a new kernel while you are at it.
Problem: NE*000 ethercard probe at 0xNNN: 00 00 C5 ... not found. (invalid signature yy zz)
Reason: First off, do you have a NE1000 or NE2000 card at the addr. 0xNNN? And if so, does the hardware address reported look like a valid one? If so, then you have a poor NE*000 clone. All NE*000 clones are supposed to have the value 0x57 in bytes 14 and 15 of the SA PROM on the card. Yours doesn't -- it has `yy zz' instead.
Solution: There are two ways to get around this. The easiest is to use an 0xbad mem_end value as described above for the `no reset ack' problem. This will bypass the signature check, as long as a non-zero I/O base is also given. This way no recompilation of the kernel is required.
The second method (for hackers) involves changing the driver itself, and then recompiling your kernel (or module). The driver (/usr/src/linux/drivers/net/ne.c) has a "Hall of Shame" list at about line 42. This list is used to detect poor clones. For example, the DFI cards use `DFI' in the first 3 bytes of the PROM, instead of using 0x57 in bytes 14 and 15, like they are supposed to.
Problem: The machine hangs during boot right after the `8390...' or `WD....' message. Removing the NE2000 fixes the problem.
Solution: Change your NE2000 base address to something like 0x340. Alternatively, you can use the ``reserve= boot argument in conjunction with the ``ether= argument to protect the card from other device driver probes.
Reason: Your NE2000 clone isn't a good enough clone. An active NE2000 is a bottomless pit that will trap any driver autoprobing in its space. Changing the NE2000 to a less-popular address will move it out of the way of other autoprobes, allowing your machine to boot.
Problem: The machine hangs during the SCSI probe at boot.
Reason: It's the same problem as above, change the ethercard's address, or use the reserve/ether boot arguments.
Problem: The machine hangs during the soundcard probe at boot.
Reason: No, that's really during the silent SCSI probe, and it's the same problem as above.
Problem: NE2000 not detected at boot - no boot messages at all
Solution: There is no `magic solution' as there can be a number of reasons why it wasn't detected. The following list should help you walk through the possible problems.
1) Build a new kernel with only the device drivers that you need. Verify that you are indeed booting the fresh kernel. Forgetting to run lilo, etc. can result in booting the old one. (Look closely at the build time/date reported at boot.) Sounds obvious, but we have all done it before. Make sure the driver is in fact included in the new kernel, by checking the System.map file for names like ne_probe.
2) Look at the boot messages carefully. Does it ever even mention doing a ne2k probe such as `NE*000 probe at 0xNNN: not found (blah blah)' or does it just fail silently. There is a big difference. Use dmesg|more to review the boot messages after logging in, or hit Shift-!PgUp? to scroll the screen up after the boot has completed and the login prompt appears.
3) After booting, do a cat /proc/ioports and verify that the full iospace that the card will require is vacant. If you are at 0x300 then the ne2k driver will ask for 0x300-0x31f. If any other device driver has registered even one port anywhere in that range, the probe will not take place at that address and will silently continue to the next of the probed addresses. A common case is having the lp driver reserve 0x378 or the second IDE channel reserve 0x376 which stops the ne driver from probing 0x360-0x380.
4) Same as above for cat /proc/interrupts. Make sure no other device has registered the interrupt that you set the ethercard for. In this case, the probe will happen, and the ether driver will complain loudly at boot about not being able to get the desired IRQ line.
5) If you are still stumped by the silent failure of the driver, then edit it and add some printk() to the probe. For example, with the ne2k you could add/remove lines (marked with a `+' or `-') in linux/drivers/net/ne.c like:
int reg0 = inb_p(ioaddr);
return ENODEV;
Then it will output messages for each port address that it checks, and you will see if your card's address is being probed or not.
6) You can also get the ne2k diagnostic from Don's ftp site (mentioned in the howto as well) and see if it is able to detect your card after you have booted into linux. Use the `-p 0xNNN' option to tell it where to look for the card. (The default is 0x300 and it doesn't go looking elsewhere, unlike the boot-time probe.) The output from when it finds a card will look something like:
Checking the ethercard at 0x300. Register 0x0d (0x30d) is 00 Passed initial NE2000 probe, value 00. 8390 registers: 0a 00 00 00 63 00 00 00 01 00 30 01 00 00 00 00 SA PROM 0: 00 00 00 00 c0 c0 b0 b0 05 05 65 65 05 05 20 20 SA PROM 0x10: 00 00 07 07 0d 0d 01 01 14 14 02 02 57 57 57 57 NE2000 found at 0x300, using start page 0x40 and end page 0x80.
Your register values and PROM values will probably be different. Note that all the PROM values are doubled for a 16 bit card, and that the ethernet address (00:00:c0:b0:05:65) appears in the first row, and the double 0x57 signature appears at the end of the PROM.
The output from when there is no card installed at 0x300 will look something like this:
Checking the ethercard at 0x300. Register 0x0d (0x30d) is ff Failed initial NE2000 probe, value ff. 8390 registers: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff SA PROM 0: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff SA PROM 0x10: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff Invalid signature found, wordlength 2.
The 0xff values arise because that is the value that is returned when one reads a vacant I/O port. If you happen to have some other hardware in the region that is probed, you may see some non 0xff values as well.
7) Try warm booting into linux from a DOS boot floppy (via loadlin) after running the supplied DOS driver or config program. It may be doing some extra (i.e. non-standard) "magic" to initialize the card.
8) Try Russ Nelson's ne2000.com packet driver to see if even it can see your card -- if not, then things do not look good. Example:
A:> ne2000 0x60 10 0x300
The arguments are software interrupt vector, hardware IRQ, and I/O base. You can get it from any msdos archive in pktdrv11.zip -- The current version may be newer than 11.
Problem: You get messages such as the following:
eth0: bogus packet size: 65531, status=0xff, nxpg=0xff
Reason: There is a shared memory problem.
Solution: The most common reason for this is PCI machines that are not configured to map in ISA memory devices. Hence you end up reading the PC's RAM (all 0xff values) instead of the RAM on the card that contains the data from the received packet.
Other typical problems that are easy to fix are board conflicts, having cache or `shadow ROM' enabled for that region, or running your ISA bus faster than 8Mhz. There are also a surprising number of memory failures on ethernet cards, so run a diagnostic program if you have one for your ethercard.
Problem: SMC EtherEZ doesn't work in non-shared memory (PIO) mode.
Reason: Older versions of the Ultra driver only supported the card in the shared memory mode of operation.
Solution: The driver in kernel version 2.0 and above also supports the programmed I/O mode of operation. Upgrade to v2.0 or newer.
Problem: Old wd8003 and/or jumper-settable wd8013 always get the IRQ wrong.
Reason: The old wd8003 cards and jumper-settable wd8013 clones don't have the EEPROM that the driver can read the IRQ setting from. If the driver can't read the IRQ, then it tries to auto-IRQ to find out what it is. And if auto-IRQ returns zero, then the driver just assigns IRQ 5 for an 8 bit card or IRQ 10 for a 16 bit card.
Solution: Avoid the auto-IRQ code, and tell the kernel what the IRQ that you have jumpered the card to in your module configuration file (or via a boot time argument for in-kernel drivers).
Problem: SMC Ultra card is detected as wd8013, but the IRQ and shared memory base is wrong.
Reason: The Ultra card looks a lot like a wd8013, and if the Ultra driver is not present in the kernel, the wd driver may mistake the ultra as a wd8013. The ultra probe comes before the wd probe, so this usually shouldn't happen. The ultra stores the IRQ and mem base in the EEPROM differently than a wd8013, hence the bogus values reported.
Solution: Recompile with only the drivers you need in the kernel. If you have a mix of wd and ultra cards in one machine, and are using modules, then load the ultra module first.
Problem: The 3c503 picks IRQ N, but this is needed for some other device which needs IRQ N. (eg. CD ROM driver, modem, etc.) Can this be fixed without compiling this into the kernel?
Solution: The 3c503 driver probes for a free IRQ line in the order {5, 9/2, 3, 4}, and it should pick a line which isn't being used. The driver chooses when the card is ifconfig'ed into operation.
If you are using a modular driver, you can use module parameters to set various things, including the IRQ value.
The following selects IRQ9, base location 0x300, <ignored value>, and if_port #1 (the external transceiver).
io=0x300 irq=9 xcvr=1
Alternately, if the driver is compiled into the kernel, you can set the same values at boot by passing parameters via LILO.
LILO: linux ether=9,0x300,0,1,eth0
The following selects IRQ3, probes for the base location, <ignored value>, and the default if_port #0 (the internal transceiver)
LILO: linux ether=3,0,0,0,eth0
Problem: 3c503: configured interrupt X invalid, will use autoIRQ.
Reason: The 3c503 card can only use one of IRQ{5, 2/9, 3, 4} (These are the only lines that are connected to the card.) If you pass in an IRQ value that is not in the above set, you will get the above message. Usually, specifying an interrupt value for the 3c503 is not necessary. The 3c503 will autoIRQ when it gets ifconfig'ed, and pick one of IRQ{5, 2/9, 3, 4}.
Solution: Use one of the valid IRQs listed above, or enable autoIRQ by not specifying the IRQ line at all.
Problem: The supplied 3c503 drivers don't use the AUI (thicknet) port. How does one choose it over the default thinnet port?
Solution: The 3c503 AUI port can be selected at boot-time for in-kernel drivers, and at module insertion for modular drivers. The selection is overloaded onto the low bit of the currently-unused dev->rmem_start variable, so a boot-time parameter of:
LILO: linux ether=0,0,0,1,eth0
should work for in-kernel drivers.
To specify the AUI port when loading as a module, just append xcvr=1 to the module options line along with your I/O and IRQ values.
For best results (and minimum aggravation) it is recommended that you use the (usually DOS) program that came with your card to disable the PnP mechanism and set it to a fixed I/O address and IRQ. Make sure the I/O address you use is probed by the driver at boot, or if using modules then supply the address as an io= option in /etc/conf.modules. You may also have to enter the BIOS/CMOS setup and mark the IRQ as Legacy-ISA instead of PnP (if your computer has this option).
Note that you typically don't need DOS installed to run a DOS based configuration program. You can usually just boot a DOS floppy disk and run them from the supplied floppy disk. You can also download OpenDOS and FreeDOS for free.
If you require PnP enabled for compatibility with some other operating system then you will have to use the isapnptools package with linux to configure the card(s) each time at boot. You will still have to make sure the I/O address chosen for the card is probed by the driver or supplied as an io= option.
Some systems have an `enable PnP OS' (or similar named) option in the BIOS/CMOS setup menu which will need to be disabled in nearly all cases or the cards won't work properly, or even be detected . Best described by one user who said `I don't know what it does behind the scenes, but it seems to be evil.'
The usual reason for this is that people are using a kernel that does not have support for their particular card built in. For a modular kernel, it usually means that the required module has not been requested for loading, or that an I/O address needs to be specified as a module option.
If you are using a modular based kernel, such as those installed by most of the linux distributions, then try and use the configuration utility for the distribution to select the module for your card. For ISA cards, it is a good idea to determine the I/O address of the card and add it as an option (e.g. io=0x340) if the configuration utility asks for any options. If there is no configuration utility, then you will have to add the correct module name (and options) to /etc/conf.modules -- see man modprobe for more details.
If you are using a pre-compiled kernel that is part of a distribution set, then check the documentation to see which kernel you installed, and if it was built with support for your particular card. If it wasn't, then your options are to try and get one that has support for your card, or build your own.
It is usually wise to build your own kernel with only the drivers you need, as this cuts down on the kernel size (saving your precious RAM for applications!) and reduces the number of device probes that can upset sensitive hardware. Building a kernel is not as complicated as it sounds. You just have to answer yes or no to a bunch of questions about what drivers you want, and it does the rest.
The next main cause is having another device using part of the I/O space that your card needs. Most cards are 16 or 32 bytes wide in I/O space. If your card is set at 0x300 and 32 bytes wide, then the driver will ask for 0x300-0x31f. If any other device driver has registered even one port anywhere in that range, the probe will not take place at that address and the driver will silently continue to the next of the probed addresses. So, after booting, do a cat /proc/ioports and verify that the full I/O space that the card will require is vacant.
Another problem is having your card jumpered to an I/O address that isn't probed by default. The list of probed addresses for each driver is easily found just after the text comments in the driver source. Even if the I/O setting of your card is not in the list of probed addresses, you can supply it at boot (for in-kernel drivers) with the ether= command as described in Passing Ethernet Arguments... Modular drivers can make use of the io= option in /etc/conf.modules to specify an address that isn't probed by default.
No it doesn't. You are just interpreting it incorrectly. This is not a bug, and the numbers reported are correct. It just happens that some 8390 based cards (wd80x3, smc-ultra, etc) have the actual 8390 chip living at an offset from the first assigned I/O port. This is the value stored in dev->base_addr, and is what ifconfig reports. If you want to see the full range of ports that your card uses, then try cat /proc/ioports which will give the numbers you expect.
Some PCI BIOSes may not enable all PCI cards at power-up, especially if the BIOS option `PNP OS' is enabled. This mis-feature is to support the current release of Windows which still uses some real-mode drivers. Either disable this option, or try and upgrade to a newer driver which has the code to enable a disabled card.
This will usually show up as reads of lots of 0xffff values. No shared memory cards of any type will work in a PCI machine unless you have the PCI ROM BIOS/CMOS SETUP configuration set properly. You have to set it to allow shared memory access from the ISA bus for the memory region that your card is trying to use. If you can't figure out which settings are applicable then ask your supplier or local computer guru. For AMI BIOS, there is usually a "Plug and Play" section where there will be an ``ISA Shared Memory Size and ``ISA Shared Memory Base settings. For cards like the wd8013 and SMC Ultra, change the size from the default of `Disabled' to 16kB, and change the base to the shared memory address of your card.
Do a cat /proc/interrupts. A running total of the number of interrupt events your card generates will be in the list given from the above. If it is zero and/or doesn't increase when you try to use the card then there is probably a physical interrupt conflict with another device installed in the computer (regardless of whether or not the other device has a driver installed/available). Change the IRQ of one of the two devices to a free IRQ.
Werner Almesberger has been working on ATM support for linux. He has been working with the Efficient Networks ENI155p board ( Efficient Networks) and the Zeitnet ZN1221 board ( Zeitnet).
Werner says that the driver for the ENI155p is rather stable, while the driver for the ZN1221 is presently unfinished.
Check the latest/updated status at the following URL:
Linux ATM Support
Is there any gigabyte ethernet support for Linux?
Yes, there are currently at least two. A driver for the Packet Engines G-NIC PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter is available in the v2.0 and v2.2 kernels For more details, support, and driver updates, see:
http://www.scyld.com/linux/drivers/yellowfin.html
The acenic.c driver available in the v2.2 kernels can be used for the Alteon AceNIC Gigabit Ethernet card and other Tigon based cards such as the 3Com 3c985. The driver should also work on the !NetGear? GA620, however this has yet to be verified.
Is there FDDI support for Linux?
Yes. Larry Stefani has written a driver for v2.0 with Digital's DEFEA (FDDI EISA) and DEFPA (FDDI PCI) cards. This was included into the v2.0.24 kernel. Currently no other cards are supported though.
Will Full Duplex give me 20MBps? Does Linux support it?
Cameron Spitzer writes the following about full duplex 10Base-T cards: ``If you connect it to a full duplex switched hub, and your system is fast enough and not doing much else, it can keep the link busy in both directions. There is no such thing as full duplex 10BASE-2 or 10BASE-5 (thin and thick coax). Full Duplex works by disabling collision detection in the adapter. That's why you can't do it with coax; the LAN won't run that way. 10BASE-T (RJ45 interface) uses separate wires for send and receive, so it's possible to run both ways at the same time. The switching hub takes care of the collision problem. The signalling rate is 10 Mbps.''
So as you can see, you still will only be able to receive or transmit at 10Mbps, and hence don't expect a 2x performance increase. As to whether it is supported or not, that depends on the card and possibly the driver. Some cards may do auto-negotiation, some may need driver support, and some may need the user to select an option in a card's EEPROM configuration. Only the serious/heavy user would notice the difference between the two modes anyway.
If you spent the extra money on a multi processor (MP) computer then buy a good ethernet card as well. For v2.0 kernels it wasn't really an issue, but it definitely is for v2.2. Most of the older non-intelligent (e.g. ISA bus PIO and shared memory design) cards were never designed with any consideration for use on a MP machine. The executive summary is to buy an intelligent modern design card and make sure the driver has been written (or updated) to handle MP operation. (The key words here are `modern design' - the PCI-NE2000's are just a 10+ year old design on a modern bus.) Looking for the text spin_lock in the driver source is a good indication that the driver has been written to deal with MP operation. The full details of why you should buy a good card for MP use (and what happens if you dont) follow.
In v2.0 kernels, only one processor was allowed `in kernel' (i.e. changing kernel data and/or running device drivers) at any given time. So from the point of view of the card (and the associated driver) nothing was different from uni processor (UP) operation and things just continued to work. (This was the easiest way to get a working MP version of Linux - one big lock around the whole kernel only allows one processor in at a time. This way you know that you won't have two processors trying to change the same thing at the same time!)
The downside to only allowing one processor in the kernel at a time was that you only got MP performance if the running programs were self contained and calculation intensive. If the programs did a lot of input/output (I/O) such as reading or writing data to disk or over a network, then all but one of the processors would be stalled waiting on their I/O requests to be completed while the one processor running in kernel frantically tries to run all the device drivers to fill the I/O requests. The kernel becomes the bottleneck and since there is only one processor running in the kernel, the performance of a MP machine in the heavy I/O, single-lock case quickly degrades close to that of a single processor machine.
Since this is clearly less than ideal (esp. for file/WWW servers, routers, etc.) the v2.2 kernels have finer grained locking - meaning that more than one processor can be in the kernel at a time. Instead of one big lock around the whole kernel, there are a lot of smaller locks protecting critical data from being manipulated by more than one processor at a time - e.g. one processor can be running the driver for the network card, while another processor is running the driver for the disk drive at the same time.
Okay, with that all in mind here are the snags: The finer locking means that you can have one processor trying to send data out through an ethernet driver while another processor tries to access the same driver/card to do something else (such as get the card statistics for cat /proc/net/dev). Oops - your card stats just got sent out over the wire, while you got data for your stats instead. Yes, the card got confused by being asked to do two (or more!) things at once, and chances are it crashed your machine in the process.
So, the driver that worked for UP is no longer good enough - it needs to be updated with locks that control access to the underlying card so that the three tasks of receive, transmit and manipulation of configuration data are serialized to the degree required by the card for stable operation. The scary part here is that a driver not yet updated with locks for stable MP operation will probably appear to be working in a MP machine under light network load, but will crash the machine or at least exhibit strange behaviour when two (or more!) processors try to do more than one of these three tasks at the same time.
The updated MP aware ethernet driver will (at a minimum) require a lock around the driver that limits access at the entry points from the kernel into the driver to `one at a time please'. With this in place, things will be serialized so that the underlying hardware should be treated just as if it was being used in a UP machine, and so it should be stable. The downside is that the one lock around the whole ethernet driver has the same negative performance implications that having one big lock around the whole kernel had (but on a smaller scale) - i.e. you can only have one processor dealing with the card at a time.
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