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Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 07:21:28 -0500
From: Randall Hopper <rhh@ct.picker.com>
To: Stanley.Hopcroft@aipo.gov.au
Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Problems with lnc0 driver (?). AMD PCINet family. Very Slow.
References: <4A256582.00833B8E.00@notes.aipo.gov.au>
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Stanley.Hopcroft@aipo.gov.au:
 |Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
 |
 |I am writing to ask for any advice about the lnc0 driver for 2.2.5.
 |
 |I have had 2 problems with it
 |
 |- panic (on a 2.2.2 upgraded to 2.2.5) during a 1 MB FTP
 |- (after reloading 2.2.5) very poor performance eg
 |
 |150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for 'cgi-suid.tar.gz' (231760
 |bytes)
 |226 Transfer complete.
 |231760 bytes received in 41.56 seconds (5.45 Kbytes/s).
 |
 |This machine with 2.2.2 manages between 100-200 kB/sec.
 |
 |My kernel config has only a driver definition (wrongly) for lnc1 (the isa
 |version) since the pci driver seems to probe and configure it
 |correctly
 |
 |lnc1 <PCNet/PCI Ethernet adapter> rev 22 int a irq 10 on pci0:11
 |lnc1: NE2100 (C-LANCE) address 00:20:35:43:5f:7f
 |lnc0 not found at 0x280

Can't speak to your panics, but the slow transfers are familiar.  I was
seeing the same thing over the holidays on my Lance-based (79C960) Allied
Telesyn AT1500 ISA NIC.

The fix was to turn off:

     CHIPSET GLOBAL FEATURES

in the Award BIOS on my Asus P55T2P4 MB.  Now I get the 1.1 MByte/sec
transfer rate this card is supposed to deliver.

What this setting is exactly and "why" this works is an open question
though.  It's probably something related to DMA as: I see this slowdown in
multiple OSs, an NE2000 clone (IRQ, no DMA) works fine in the same slot on
the same IRQ (multiple OSs), and I found a DejaNews post of a Gravis
Ultrasound owner failing to get Ultrasound DMA working unless this BIOS
option was disabled.

Asus/Award seem to be aware of some problems with having this option
enabled as the 205 P55T2P4 BIOS has this option disabled by default, but
previous BIOS versions and ASUS docs have it enabled.

Randall Hopper