onboard NIC: Attansic L2

[Chris Snook]

Dan Thurman wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> Motherboard: P5GC-MX/1333,  onboard Attansic L2 NIC chip
> 
> Earlier I reported a nightmarish experience trying to get my onboard Attansic 
> L2 NIC working after compiling the source code for it, installing it, and so 
> on and could not figure out why the NIC was not turning on the phyiscal link.
> 
> I think I understand the symptoms but not the underlying cause.
> 
> I reported in my earlier post, that I blamed the twisted pair cable but it 
> turns out this was not the problem.  The cabled is fine.  I had to go to my 
> garbage can to retrieve the cable I almost threw out.
> 
> I can repeatedly prove (at least to myself), that under a multiboot situation,
> if you boot using w2000/XP, M$ turns ON/OFF/ON the link when coming up and 
> when it is shutdown/rebooted, it disables the link.  It somehow turns the NIC 
> OFF on reboot/shutdown.
> 
> When you bootup Fedora, Fedora goes along as it normally does, probes eth0,
> but FAILS to turn ON the link.  You CANNOT get Fedora to bring up the link no 
> matter what you do. The ONLY way to get the link back is to physically power 
> off the power supply because the motherboard always get's it's power unless 
> the PS itself is turned off and until the power drains out.
> 
> Only then, you can bring up Fedora's OS and get the NIC link to work.
> 
> I wonder if M$ plugs microcode into the Attansic L2 chip that renders Fedora 
> unable to turn on the link OR the code is missing from the Fedora networking 
> process to turn ON the link.
> 
> Can someone in development look into this and let me know what is going on?
> 
> At the moment, I have a temporary solution for now but I'd like to make sure 
> no other helpless chap faces this problem like I did for weeks trying to 
> figure this out.
> 
> Regards,
> Dan
> 

Are you using the version of the driver that came with the motherboard, or my 
cleaned up version?  I've fixed a few bugs, but this one doesn't sound familiar, 
so it's quite possible my code doesn't fix this either.  If you want to try it 
out, it's here:

http://people.redhat.com/csnook/atl2/

I'm working on getting this merged for 2.6.25, and once that's done I'll start 
thinking about Fedora kernel backports.

Please report test results to me off-list.  We might need to instrument it a bit 
to find out what the #$^% Windows is doing to it, since most of my testing so 
far has been on single-boot ASUS EeePCs.

	-- Chris