9fans archive / 1996 / 10 / 4 /    prev next

From: miller@ham... miller@ham...
Subject: Installing & IP
Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 13:52:26 GMT

Jim McKie says:

> ... the 3C590 is a 10Mbps card only and should work

I found problems with the 3C590: particularly under the IL protocol,
transmission was very slow and often hung up completely.  Some
investigation showed that the TxAvailable interrupt (which signals
that the adapter's transmit FIFO has space for the next packet) wasn't
being received.  (Presumably only the IL protocol is efficient enough
to overrun the adapter's transmission speed and allow the FIFO to
fill up ...)

I believe the problem is that the TxAvailable threshold needs to be
set in units of longwords rather than bytes (could someone with
access to hardware documentation for the 3C590 please confirm this?).
If this is right, in ether509.c the line

	COMMAND(port, SetTxAvailable, len);

ought to be

	COMMAND(port, SetTxAvailable, len>>2);

After this change on my system, TxAvailable interrupts occur as 
expected and IL transmission runs without a problem.

-- Richard Miller