On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 11:09:13PM -0800, Bill Paul wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > > Yes, it's me. I'm still alive.
> > It's great to hear that one of the most talented FreeBSD hackers is back
> > in business :)
> >
> > Does this means that you can afford some time to investigate the problems
> > regarding your old software?
>
> Not unless it's something I can fix using easily available resources.
> I can't easily drop everything and slap together a test setup with
> exactly the right software and hardware I need to debug everyone's
> particular problem. ("This bug only occurs in -CURRENT as of 30
> seconds ago and on an UltraSPARC 10 with 16 if_dc interfaces and
> I need you to fix it _NOW_ pleasepleasepleaseI'llevengiveyouahandjob.")
On the same basic subject - it seems that sometime after the release of
FreeBSD 4.3 the pcn ethernet driver was broken. I did find PR kern/34071
which indicated that the driver was broken in 4.5RC2. I've tried the
following versions of FreeBSD from the fixit CDROMS:
4.3 - works fine
4.4 - doesn't work - ping can't get to the outside world (host
unreachable - it's a directly connected machine I'm trying to ping...),
though interface status info appears good as reported by ifconfig. Media &
mediaopt options don't seem to make any difference. While the line will go
to half-duplex or 10baseT/UTP modes, it doesn't solve the problem of not
getting bits out the door...
4.5 - same as 4.4
4.6.2 - doesn't work - after ifconfig'ing the interface with an IP
address & such, ifconfig reports that the interface is in hardware
loopback. This is confirmed by the loss of link status on the switch the
interface is connected to. Media & mediaopt options don't change this state.
4.7 - same as 4.6.2
4.8-prerelease - same as 4.6.2
5.0 - has the same issues as 4.6.2.
The main interest in this driver is that IBM uses the AMD 79C971 chip with
a National Semiconductor DP83840 PHY on the motherboard in the
Netfinity 5500 server. The 79C971 chip with a Level 1 PHY is used in their
fault tolerant 10/100 PCI NIC of the same vintage. I've got a number of
these machines that I need/want to run FreeBSD on.
I can make a quad cpu 5500 machine available for remote login, with
additional access via a second machine to the serial console for
test/debug/etc if this will help get the problem fixed. Let me know what
has to be added to the system/test setup and I'll do my best to get it
together. I'm happy to apply patches, test, compile, etc. as well.
Regards,
Dexter McNeil
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