Re: onboard NIC: Attansic L2

Dan Thurman wrote:

Folks,

Motherboard: P5GC-MX/1333,  onboard Attansic L2 NIC chip

Earlier I reported a nightmarish experience trying to get my onboard Attansic L2 NIC working after compiling the source code for it, installing it, and so on and could not figure out why the NIC was not turning on the phyiscal link.

I think I understand the symptoms but not the underlying cause.

I reported in my earlier post, that I blamed the twisted pair cable but it turns out this was not the problem. The cabled is fine. I had to go to my garbage can to retrieve the cable I almost threw out.

I can repeatedly prove (at least to myself), that under a multiboot situation,

if you boot using w2000/XP, M$ turns ON/OFF/ON the link when coming up and when it is shutdown/rebooted, it disables the link. It somehow turns the NIC OFF on reboot/shutdown.

When you bootup Fedora, Fedora goes along as it normally does, probes eth0,

but FAILS to turn ON the link. You CANNOT get Fedora to bring up the link no matter what you do. The ONLY way to get the link back is to physically power off the power supply because the motherboard always get's it's power unless the PS itself is turned off and until the power drains out.

Only then, you can bring up Fedora's OS and get the NIC link to work.

I wonder if M$ plugs microcode into the Attansic L2 chip that renders Fedora unable to turn on the link OR the code is missing from the Fedora networking process to turn ON the link.

Can someone in development look into this and let me know what is going on?

At the moment, I have a temporary solution for now but I'd like to make sure no other helpless chap faces this problem like I did for weeks trying to figure this out.

Regards,
Dan

http://people.redhat.com/csnook/atl2/

	-- Chris