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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!osuunx.ucc.okstate.edu!moe.ksu.ksu.edu!crcnis1.unl.edu!wupost!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!chnews!ornews.intel.com!percy!agora!implode!davidg From: davidg@implode.rain.com (David Greenman) Subject: Re: 3Com and SMC Ethernet boards Organization: Delta Systems, Portland, OR. Message-ID: <C966w3.2so@implode.rain.com> Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1993 09:12:02 GMT Lines: 22 >Western Digital sold the rights to their line of ethernet controllers to SMC >(standard microsystems)... As near as I have been able to determine, the cards >are identical... The code does not seem to use the 16bit port or the 16K of memory >(correct me if I'm wrong... You know you will)... but they work okay anyway... This is correct in the stock 386BSD 0.1. There was a patch from Barry Lustig last year that kludged-in 16bit operation with a 'options "WD8013"' in the config file. This works, but it is necessary to also change your device line to specify 16384 bytes of memory for iosize. Of course, make sure you don't have any BIOS extention ROMS anywhere in this 16k region. Also, enabling this option will usually cause your machine to hang when you attempt a reboot. This is because the WD8013 asserts the "memcs16" line on the isa bus...messing up BIOS extention ROMs that are only 8 bit. The if_we driver is seriously broken in lots of ways, though, and I would recommend switching to my new 80x3/3c503 driver (called 'if_ed') when I make it available (it is still in beta-test...but should be widely available in a week or so). My new driver does all of the memory/bus width determination automatically, has no known bugs (doesn't even have the reboot problem), and is much higher performance. -DG