Which Cards Don't Play Nice Together?

[phillipsjk256]

Hello,

In the past I tried to set up freesco as a router/switch with ~5 NICs. I abandoned that due to cost and poor performance. (The RTL8139 cards don't seem to like to play together) . (The Correct solution was buying a SOHO switch)

Recently I shuffled some cards In my router after a hardware/ISP failure. I found the 3Com509B (Combo card supporting PnP, full duplex) does not configure (PnP) properly with a 3Com509 card present (which does not support PnP). I ended up using the DOS utility to manually configure both cards. Looking at ~/linux/drivers/net/3c509.c gave me a hint as to why it didn't work, but I digress.

One thing that concerns me about compiling a list of this nature is the potential for false-positives and errors. An incompatibility list would be useless if people using it are forced to unecessarily limit their configuration.

One reason I shuffled cards around is that One my SMC Ether-EZ cards stopped wroking properly in the temporary replacement box. I noticed that both SMC cards used the same memory range of c0000-c2000 (In the first megabyte of memory). I was tempted to jump to the conclusion that they were in conflict. A review
of ~/linux/drivers/smc-ultra.c revealed that the shared memory is disabled most of the time due to potential conflicts with AHA1542 (SCSI) cards. If the memory is only used during interrupt servicing, and only one interrupt is serviced at a time, there is no conflict.

Another concern would be the sheer number of cards out there. Does anybody think trying to compile an incompatibility list is a good idea? Note, this would be distinct from "linux compatibility" lists already in existance (Which really should be sorted by kernel version IMHO).

Regards,

James Phillips

PS: I was going to attach an edited report.txt, but that apears to be disabled for this forum section

[Lightning]

I think that it would be helpful to have a list of network cards and known issues that they can have and even from a support standpoint it is nice to know some of the various issues that can come up.

[Slowpoke]

<!--QuoteBegin-Lightning+--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Lightning)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->I think that it would be helpful to have a list of network cards and known issues that they can have and even from a support standpoint it is nice to know some of the various issues that can come up.[/quote]I agree.

<!--QuoteBegin-phillipsjk256+--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (phillipsjk256)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->An incompatibility list would be useless if people using it are forced to unecessarily limit their configuration.[/quote]To address this point, the PS2-Linux site (http://playstation2-linux.com/sog.php) has a monitor compatibility chart that is 'user maintained', in that registered users can add to the database list of monitors that they have / have not gotten to work with the linux package for the PS2. There are some monitors listed that show both "working" and "not working" in the list, some of which will have a 'trick' listed as to how the user got it to work. I think that something like this would work here because the list could show that while some could not get a particular combo to work, other may have by doing 'fill_in_the_blank_here'.

[justdave]

I think it would be useful to also include some information on the bios. I have seen cards work with some bios' but not others.

[CDFiXER]

I like the idea, heck I even mentioned it a year or so back but it was stepped on pretty hard.

Glad to see it is back and more peeps are giving it a thumbs up.

I purposely dug around scrap heaps looking for odd ball NIC's to use during Beta testing Freesco.

For example, I have some Intel EtherExpress Pro 100mb ISA cards that will not work with Freesco, or most other Linux for that matter. At one time I had a list, compiled from discussions with Lightning and my own tinlering, of Linksys Etherfast cards that would work with what driver. Linksys had about a dozen versions of that card with widely differing drivers. :blink: