Re: Re: Problem with Etherboot driver for PCnet/FAST 79C971 - SOLVED

Marty Connor wrote:
>> Can you verify whether a subset of the interupts would also work?  I 
>> would be particularily interested in the whether leaving the receive 
>> interrupt RINTM enabled would be OK.  The receive interruupt would 
>> need to be in place if the driver gets PXE enabled.
> 
> I believe that those bits must remain masked (all interrupts from the 
> NIC turned OFF) unless the PXE code decides to have us run in interrupt 
> mode.  The reason for the crashing is probably that a packet got 
> received and an interrupt got generated that we were not ready to handle 
> (or we transmitted, and got a transmit_done interrupt that was not 
> handled).

I agree. If interrupts are enabled, handler must be there.
I suspect that all other cards of this type have them disabled by 
default, so they worked out-of-box because we didn't enable them 
explicitely.


> So, many thanks to Krzystof for finding this bug.  It's nice to have 
> another working driver.
> 
> If you're in the mood, and would like to help a bit more, you could read 
> the file src/README.pixify, which describes how to modify the driver 
> source so that we can actually deal with interrupts.  You can use 
> rtl8139.c as an example.

I don't have enough time to play with it currently, and network 
controllers are not my domain, my knowledge is rather small. But I can 
test patches if you send it to me :)

> This discussion should probably migrate to Etherboot-Developers, and 
> people interested in things like this (and who wouldn't be?? :)  are 
> welcome to subscribe to Etherboot-Developers using the following link:
> 
>     http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/etherboot-developers
> 
> We'd enjoy your company.

OK, thanks, I will subscribe to this list :)

Regards

	Krzysztof Lichota



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