Problems with etherboot & NE2000 PCI

[roessner@rbg.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de (Ralph Roessner)]

Hi,

I tried to netboot a client using a Realtek 8139 based "NE2000 compatible"
NIC and etherboot 4.0pre8. However, after detecting the NIC (we added the
device ID, since etherboot knows about the 8029 only) and trying to write a
test string to the NIC, the driver sits in a tight loop reading the status
word and waiting for an indication that the transfer is complete. Tracing
the results shows that the appropriate bit is never set.

This seems to be a classical "worked fine with the predecessor" problem,
hence my questions: Does anybody know if it makes sense to try booting this
card with etherboot when the ns8390 driver don't know about this particular
chipset, or what changes to the driver I could try to resolve the above
problem, or has somebody already netbooted a 8139 based NIC and says: The
driver works fine, your problem is somewhere else?

I also tried working with netboot but the packet driver for my NIC is about
60k and netboot is unable to make a <=64k uncompressed image using it
(*surprise*).

I take it that the 4.0 release of etherboot doesn't contain any changes to
the ns8390 driver compared with the 4.0pre8 release. Correct?

BTW: Any predictions whether I will run into problems trying to boot an
Intel EtherExpress Pro 100+ with the etherboot eepro100 driver? It mentions
only the Pro 100B, which is based on the predecessor (at least, in
identification numbers) chip ...

Thanks in advance,
   Ralph Roessner

-- 
   Ralph Roessner                                  TU Darmstadt
   EMail: roessner@rbg.informatik.tu-darmstadt.d   CS Dept.