corega FEtherII PCC-TXD

Colin Peters colinp at mx3.canvas.ne.jp
Mon Dec 6 07:57:44 PST 2004


Hello excuse me for my abrupt entry.

I've been trying to get FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE going on a somewhat
old Japanese laptop I have. Mostly it works well, but I have had no
luck with the PCCard ethernet adapter. It is a Corega FEtherII
PCC-TXD. After some searching I noticed a recent entry to the
CVS for pccard.conf which appears to add support for this card by
assigning it to the same entry as the FEther PCC-TXD. After
fooling around with pccard.conf for a while, then realizing that
it is no longer in use in this version (!) I recompiled the kernel
to add support by copying the line for the FEther PCC-TXD in the
appropriate files. This got me some lines from ed1, which was
better than the <unknown device> I had been getting up to that
point:

ed1: <corega K.K. corega FEtherII PCC-TXD> at port 0x300-0x31f irq 9
function 0 config 7 on pccard1
ed1: [GIANT-LOCKED]
ed1: Ethernet address: 00:09:41:7a:11:d4
ed1: if_start running deferred for Giant
type NE2000 (16 bit)

The MAC address even appears correct, so far so good.

However, the link light doesn't come on, and if I try to get set up
the interface using dhclient I get this:

ed1: device timeout

Two things I have noticed:

First, my old Windows98 hardware info had this assigned on IRQ 11.
IRQ 9 appears to be the same as the PCI bridge:

cbb0: <TI1221 PCI-CardBus Bridge> irq 9 at device 19.0 on pci0

Second, I have done a lot of searching and have found some discussions
of this card on Japanese lists such as bsd-nomads (for example
http://www.clave.gr.jp/ml/bsd-nomads/200211/msg00020.html ). The
suggestion there was to add a line in if_ed_pccards.c (see
http://home.jp.freebsd.org/cgi-bin/showmail/bsd-nomads/16468 ):

                      ed_pccard_memwrite(dev, 0x3c2, 0x4);

Which apparently does some twiddling of the PHY power down mode flag.

Since I am brave/desperate/stupid I went ahead and simply hacked this
into the ed driver to see if it would work. It did not.

Finally, the Japanese lists also seem to suggest that the
problem is that the FEther PCC-TXD is based on the AX88190 chip while
the FEtherII PCC-TXD is based on AX88790, which has different bugs
apparently. Several cheap cards use this chip I think. The names
mentioned were PLANEX FW-300TX、Netgear FA411NA、Billionton
LNA-100B and BUFFALO LPC4-CLX.

Sorry for the long post, but does anyone have any information or
ideas on getting this card to work? I'm willing to hack on my kernel
if given a bit of direction.

Thanks for any advice,
Colin.





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