FA311 RH7.0 & natsemi.c
 

I'm having problems with a FA311 card and 2.2.16-22 kernel.

I have managed to build the fa311.c module (V1.04), and it mostly runs OK, except every now and again the PC crashed dead. I have by elimination traced this to the ethernet, and further investigation shows that depmod gives a load of undefines, i.e. ...

depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.2.16-22-Node/net/fa311.o
depmod: eth_type_trans
depmod: request_region
depmod: pcibios_read_config_byte
depmod: __kfree_skb
depmod: alloc_skb
depmod: init_etherdev
depmod: ether_setup
depmod: bh_active
depmod: kmalloc
depmod: release_region
depmod: pcibios_present
depmod: free_irq
depmod: pcibios_read_config_dword
depmod: unregister_netdev
depmod: kfree
depmod: request_irq
depmod: netif_rx
depmod: skb_over_panic
depmod: jiffies
depmod: printk
depmod: __const_udelay
depmod: pcibios_find_device

I can't use the precompiled fa311.o because I've built the kernel with other features enabled, i.e. amateur radio.

And for the same reason I can't upgrade to the 2.4 kernel - because of the amateur radio stuff.

So now you're thinking, hey, tell him to use the natsemi driver.

Well, I've tried that (V1.07), and it is better, i.e. the machine doesn't crash and there's no unresolved dependencies, but what happens instead is that several times a day, the network just stops, i.e. ping doesn't work

If I do a network stop/start, it all bursts into life again.

There's only two PC's on the network, and they negotiate to 100bps full-duplex. I ran the module with debug=7 but it's just all gobble-de-gook to me.

So has anyone any ideas on what is going on, or how I can get this FA311 card to run reliably

Mike:confused:

As a footnote to this, I tried several different cards in the PC over that last few weeks. None worked with any reliability - the worst being 3com cards which crashed the machine as soon as the link speed was being negotiated.

After reading stuff on the 3Com site and other docs found on the www I have decided that there was something fundementally wrong with the PCI bus on the PC, and have binned it.

If anyone is interested (or cares) it's a (or was) a GMB-P54SPV motherboard (Pentium P100) with BIOS 50-0105-2A51DG3A-V1.05