onboard NIC: Attansic L2 [SOLVED]

[Dan Thurman]

On Tuesday 29 January 2008 12:07:05 pm Les wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 15:01 -0800, Dan Thurman wrote:
> > On Monday 28 January 2008 01:54:16 pm Rick Stevens wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 13:07 -0800, Dan Thurman wrote:
> > > > Folks,
> > > >
> > > > Motherboard: P5GC-MX/1333,  onboard Attansic L2 NIC chip
> > > >
[snip!]
>
> Hi, Dan,
>         Some hardware has the clock bit for latching registers in the same
> word as the power bit.  This results in some devices requiring that
> particular register to be written with the desired action (on or off)
> and then written again to flop the clocking bit.  I suspect from your
> description that the software writer for Microsoft discovered that for
> your particular hardware and that would explain the action you see.
> However I cannot confirm that, and most likely the specs for the chip
> would not include that detail without a great deal of interpolation of
> the description or "typical use software" that most vendors supply to
> the OEM's.  In fact you and I may not even be able to access the low
> level spec, because the companies treat these things as trade secrets
> and proprietary information, since knowing the registers and operating
> sequences give one a good idea of the internal organization of the
> parts, and that is competitive information in the high tech world.
>         What I am saying is that the Great Satan is probably not the reason
> for the behavior you are seeing.
Yes, that is true. But I am using M$ for multibooting so someone has to be 
blamed although not necessarily fairly. I chose the lesser of two evils, I 
guess... but that does not include me! ;-)
> Regards,
> Les H

Chris Shook of Redhat has contacted me and asked me to check the multi-booting 
of his latest pre-release Alteros L2 NIC driver and there was a number of 
facts that was uncovered during our correspondence.

1) Atheros bought Attansic and has improved the source code of
    which Chris was given a copy.

2) Get rid of your Attansic L2 drivers and update to the latest
    Atheros L2 driver for all OS's that needs it. Chris will soon upstream
    his latest Atheros L2 driver.  It should start in a few days or however
    long it takes for the upstream cycle to complete.

Apparently, installing Attansic drivers and Atheros drivers in a multi-boot 
environment caused some problems. The Attansic drivers does not always turn 
on the link once turned off by an OS shutting down and another OS starting up 
depending on which OS had the Attansic driver and which had the Atheros 
driver when multi-booting.

I did step (2) above, tested several combinations of startup, shutdown 
switching different OSes and the links all come up. This testing involves 
only 2K, XP, and F8.

Kudos to Chris!
Dan