3Com 3CR990-TX-95/3CR990SVR95

[acc at anthonychavez.org]

Friends:

I recently purchased a box of 3Com 3CR990-TX-95 NICs from eBay and am
currently in the process of testing them with a Dell system that a
friend lent me (sorry, no specs).

The back of the functional cards are printed with the following
information: FAB 02-0182-000 REV 07.  The only one that has proven to be
incompatible (see below) states REV 05.  This is strong evidence to me
that the issue lies in the cards themselves and that, for some reason or
another, REV 05 cards are incompatible with the txp driver.

This solitary card, surprisingly, seems to function just fine from the
outside (i.e., the 100Mbps indicator light illuminates and the "ACT"
light blinks) but spawns a kernel panic when trying to boot or install
4.8-RELEASE or 5.1-RELEASE.

When installing either release, I get the following message as
/stand/sysinstall loads.  I get a similar message when booting
4.8-RELEASE.

panic: resource_list_release: resource entry is not busy

OpenBSD 3.3 and NetBSD 1.6.1 don't detect the NIC at all.  FWIW, neither
does Debian 3.0r1 or Slackware 9.0 (both Linux kernel 2.4.20).  And
unfortunately, this box was donated sans a CD-ROM drive and I don't have
a spare, so I can't install Windoze to see if the NIC is completely
b0rked.

Has anyone had similar experiences?  Is my hypothesis correct?  And if
so, are there any workarounds?  Am I going to run into problems with the
3CR990SVR95 that I just purchased?

Thanks!

-- 
Anthony Chavez                             http://www.anthonychavez.org/
mailto:acc at anthonychavez.org         jabber:acc at jabber.anthonychavez.org