Re: Problems with etherboot & NE2000 PCI

[Andrew Coulthurst <andyc@svarog.demon.co.uk>]

Hi Ralph + all listening.

If you have a look at the Etherboot homepage there are some patches 
against 4.0pre8 for the eepro100b driver written by myself. As it
happens 
I actually have ( according to the box anyhow ) a EtherExpress PRO/100+.
As the saying goes - it works for me , your mileage may vary - but give
it
a try and if it doesn't work I'll see if I can help.

P.S. As Ken has said the patches should be okay against 4.0 ( nothing
seemed 
to have changed in this area between 4.0 and 4.0pre8 ) - but I just
haven't
had the time this week to test.

Good Luck,

Andy Coulthurst.


Ralph Roessner wrote:
> 
> 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.