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
Are you using the version of the driver that came with the motherboard, or my
cleaned up version? I've fixed a few bugs, but this one doesn't sound familiar,
so it's quite possible my code doesn't fix this either. If you want to try it
out, it's here:
http://people.redhat.com/csnook/atl2/
I'm working on getting this merged for 2.6.25, and once that's done I'll start
thinking about Fedora kernel backports.
Please report test results to me off-list. We might need to instrument it a bit
to find out what the #$^% Windows is doing to it, since most of my testing so
far has been on single-boot ASUS EeePCs.
-- Chris
