Knoppix using NatSemi DP83815 stopped working

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Originally Posted by H1ghlander

...What's weird is I don't see any changes in the register settings, despite that once renegotiation is reset, it just works. ......

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OK, I misunderstood what you were saying in the last post, once I actually started picking through the sets of data you posted I see thay are all the same. That is not weird if indeed they are eeprom values (as claimed) and not registers. I don't know if you're looking at registers with another tool or if you are thinking these values should be the chip registers, but what we care about to fix the problem is the eeprom values. While I had to use the DP83815 documentation and the register contents to see that the NIC was not being set correctly to auto-negotiate (as best as I can tell from the documentation), what we really need to figure out is not a good set of register settings (which we could get by looking at the registers once we kick one of these nics into working again), but rather the eeprom settings that let the registers get set up right.

I'll try to make sense of these values, maybe they will make more sense for your notebook than they did for mine, but I'm still hoping you can get the settings as reported by the national semi diag program -ee command.

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Originally Posted by H1ghlander

This output is from my ze4100 with the NatSemi DP83815 .... I'll also post the results from my ZE5185 which had the problem next.


ethtool -e eth1

Address Data
------- ------
0x00 0x103c
0x01 0x002a
...

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Actually, the mystery deepens after looking at your settings. The doc calls these first two words of data the Configuration subsystem. While you have a 103c here in both devices, (which the natsemidiag indicates is a vendor code) I have a 3c08 - but the Natsemidiag reports a 103c for me in the same location!!!

We don't seem to have any conflict in locations 02-06.

07-09 are for the MAC address, so this will be different for each device.

0a always seems to match for both of us.

0b contains the checksum, which includes the mac address so will be different for each of us.

That seems to indicate the only "strange" settings are the CFGSID or Configuration Subsystem Identification Register. How this is causing problems, or even if it is, is not clear yet. I'm still hoping that you will post the results from the -ee option on the natsemidiag program, which seems to get very different results looking at these same locations than the generic ethtool does.

Also, I quoted your above post because I wanted to ask about the eth1 reference. In your other posts you list eth0, as I would have expected and as I have been using. In this case you listed eth1. Is there a reason for this? Was it just a typo? Are you by any chance looking at a different NIC added to the notebook and not the original factory installed NIC?

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Originally Posted by Harry Kuhman

That seems to indicate the only "strange" settings are the CFGSID or Configuration Subsystem Identification Register. How this is causing problems, or even if it is, is not clear yet. I'm still hoping that you will post the results from the -ee option on the natsemidiag program, which seems to get very different results looking at these same locations than the generic ethtool does.

Also, I quoted your above post because I wanted to ask about the eth1 reference. In your other posts you list eth0, as I would have expected and as I have been using. In this case you listed eth1. Is there a reason for this? Was it just a typo? Are you by any chance looking at a different NIC added to the notebook and not the original factory installed NIC?

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The ZE4100 has a miniPCI wireless and it seems to come up as eth0. I also found out last night as I was updating XP, that there was an update for the LanExpress (DP83815) controller, so I did not install it.

I installed MorphixCombined-Gnome-0.4.1, and did a bunch of configurations and apt-gets. I was able to find mii-diag as a dpkg, but can't find a natsemi-diag dpkg (though I admit to not looking too hard as I 'm not very familiar with Debian). If I can't find one, I'll have to apt-get the compiler and build it by hand. If you have a pointer, I can get the diags for the ZE4100 in the next day or so. I will have to play with the ZE5185 to get the register settings for that.

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Originally Posted by H1ghlander

If you have a pointer, I can get the diags for the ZE4100 in the next day or so.

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The diags are at
http://www.scyld.com/diag/index.html

The diag I seem to have best results with is
ftp://ftp.scyld.com/pub/diag/natsemi-diag.c

Instructions for compiling are at the end of the C code.

No need to ap-get a compiler, it compiles fine from knoppix if you just type in the given line (of course, you have to mount the disk where you store the file as read/write first).

YESSS thanks for sudo mii-tool -r :)

it's working on my hp nx9005

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Originally Posted by nighty

YESSS thanks for sudo mii-tool -r :)

it's working on my hp nx9005

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Thanks for that report. Did Knoppix networking ever work on that system? If so, do you know when it stopped working?

Just looked up the nx9005, looks like it has a couple of nice features that my hp notebook lacks (firewire and 2 PC card slots rather than the one I have). What did it set you back(and what currency if not US dollars)?

Here ya go.
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/natsemi-diag -aa -f

natsemi-diag.c:v2.07 12/17/2002 Donald Becker ([email protected])
http://www.scyld.com/diag/index.html
Index #1: Found a NatSemi DP83815 adapter at 0x2400.
Natsemi 83815 series with station address 00:c0:9f:1b:ef:5c
Transceiver setting Autonegotation advertise 10/100 Mbps half and full duplex.
NatSemi DP83815 chip registers at 0x2400
0x000: 00000004 e805e000 00000002 00000000 00000000 00f1cd65 00000001 00000000
0x020: 210a72a0 d0f01002 00000000 00000000 210a71b0 10700020 00000000 00008000
0x040: 0080000a 00200000 40000004 00005cef ffff0004 3f3f3f3f 00000505 00000000
0x060: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
0x080: 00003100 0000786d 00002000 00005c21 000005e1 000045e1 00000005 00002801
0x0A0: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
0x0C0: 00000615 00000002 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000100 00000030
0x0E0: 00000000 000000bf 00000804 00008200 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
No interrupt sources are pending (00000000).
Receive mode is 0xc8200000: Normal unicast and hashed multicast.
Rx filter contents: c000 1b9f 5cef 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000

Hi Harry,
Long time since this thread was last used, but thought I would post to update. Knoppix 3.3 now seems to connect to the internet first time every time but only if I exit xp by clicking restart, and have the cd in the tray ready to boot.

Steve.

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Originally Posted by stevethayne

.....Knoppix 3.3 now seems to connect to the internet first time every time but only if I exit xp by clicking restart, and have the cd in the tray ready to boot.

Steve.

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Hi Steve,

Glad to hear it's working better for you. In my case, on the notebook that once booted fine but stopped connecting to the 'net after a "security update", my situation changed in the other direction. Knoppix would hang completely for me on boot, blank screen, never finish. I couldn't use the newer versions for quite some time. Finally I found that if I used a combination of two cheat codes, noscsi and acpi=off, Knoppix would boot OK. Since the acpi=off also was one of the ways that I could get around the NIC setup issue in the past, this "fix" aslo lets me use the NIC, but it's certainly a pain to have to do each time I boot from CD. It's not clear to me why I now need the cheat codes, but it's certainly something in the newer Knoppix release (the old CD's boot fine, but, of course, the same old CD's that used to let me on the 'net without any extra steps still need the cheat codes or the reset trick to get the NIC set up right now).

Harry

This thread should be named natsemi & DP83815 network start failures. Previously, it was posted in this thread, "dmesg errors: NETDEV watchdog: eth0 transmit timed out." I think there is a large clue in this message.
I have experienced this problem on Compaq Presario 2190US with knoppix and gentoo live-cd's.
I have observed that even if the nodhcp option is entered on the command line, gentoo searches for a network assignment, as does knoppix.
I don't have time to prove it, but it appears to me the natsemi driver deserves first place for examination for the source of the transmit time out. And ifconfig, which does not actually bring up a timed out DP83815 eth0 fully, deserves a close second place. This problem is wasting a lot of people's time and deserves highlighting in installation documentation, in any case.