Date: Sun, 6 Dec 1998 11:45:43 -0500 (EST) From: Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> To: mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith) Cc: hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Test request, SMC 1211TX EtherEZ PCI card Message-ID: <199812061645.LAA17567@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> In-Reply-To: <199812060646.WAA02587@dingo.cdrom.com> from "Mike Smith" at Dec 5, 98 10:46:31 pm
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Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Mike Smith had
to walk into mine and say:
> > Hi guys, got a quick favor to ask. SMC has this (relatively) new
> > NIC called the EtherEZ 1211-TX. This is a PCI 10/100 adapter. From
> > what I can tell, I think this board uses a RealTek 8139 or compatible
> > chipset, which means that in theory it should work with the rl driver.
>
> Er, aren't all the 'TX' boards based on the SMC9432TX part?
>
> If so, you want the 'tx' driver.
I thought that initially myself, but that appears not to be the case.
The EPIC boards are called the EtherPower II series, whereas this
new board is called an EtherEZ. It's meant to be a low cost card,
and if it does in fact use a RealTek chip, then that's exactly
what it is. :)
I downloaded the drivers from ftp.smc.com for this card and ran
strings -a on a few of them: they explicitly mention the rtl8139,
so it looks like it is indeed a RealTek chip. I also looked at the
SCO OpenSewer 5 driver kit: it includes an 'r8e.h' header file
which contains definitions that match the information I have for
the RealTek and mentions the 8129 and 8139. This seems to show
pretty conclusively that it is a RealTek chip. However this
appears to be SMC's own build of the driver; in many cases I think the
distributors just use whatever drivers are provided by RealTek
and make up their own diskettes, but SMC seems to have compiled
their own driver versions. This being the case, it's possible they
may have used their own PCI vendor and device ID in the EEPROM
and customized the driver to match, just to it look like their
board is different from others and get you to use their particular
drivers. So even though it's a RealTek chip, the rl driver still
might not detect it as such.
Then again I may just be overly paranoid. Either way, I can't really
tell without a board, and I don't really want to go to the trouble of
getting one when somebody else can just do 5 minutes of testing and
tell me what I need to know.
-Bill
P.S. It's too bad that SMC is using the RealTek chip. There are plenty
of other cheap fast ethernet controllers thet could have used that
would have provided much better performance.
--
=============================================================================
-Bill Paul (212) 854-6020 | System Manager, Master of Unix-Fu
Work: wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu | Center for Telecommunications Research
Home: wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu | Columbia University, New York City
=============================================================================
"It is not I who am crazy; it is I who am mad!" - Ren Hoek, "Space Madness"
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