[U-Boot-Users] Spectacularly Weird U-Boot Behavior w/NE2000

[Craig A. Vanderborgh <craigv@voxware.com>]

Hello Everybody,

I have just completed a port to our board of u-boot-1.1.3, from CVS.  
Everything is actually working very well, so kudos to everybody for all 
of the fine work done in the past few months.

I have incorporated Christian's NE2000 driver for PCMCIA, and have 
configured it for my PXA255 custom board according to his instructions 
and the instructions in the README.PXA_CF in /doc.  I am have had some 
success with this - and an amazing problem.

I can successfully activate the PCMCIA card using "pinit on".  When I do 
this, I see the following:

$ pinit on
PCMCIA Card detected
Low Power Ethernet LAN Adapter Socket Communications, Inc Revis
            Network Adapter Card

So u-boot can read the CIS and figure out that I have a socket LPE.  
Nice.  Then, I try to do a ping - and it works:

$ ping 10.250.1.7
NE2000 - eeprom ESA: 09:09:84:8a:08:0c
host 10.250.1.7 is alive
$

Wonderful.  But now, after doing the ping, u-boot's "view" of flash 
memory gets corrupted.  For example, look at this:

$ md 80000
00080000: 56190080 65070080 40300080 18670080    ...V...e..0 at ..g.
00080010: 00000080 00000080 dfc00080 00020080    ................
00080020: 2e340080 762d0080 2d310080 31610080    ..4...-v..1-..a1
00080030: 52450080 41440080 72650080 006c0080    ..ER..DA..er..l.
00080040: e1a00080 e1a00080 e1a00080 e1a00080    ................
00080050: e1a00080 e1a00080 e1a00080 e1a00080    ................
00080060: ea000080 016f0080 00000080 000b0080    ......o.........
00080070: e1a00080 e3a00080 e10f0080 e3120080    ................
00080080: 1a000080 e3a00080 ef120080 e10f0080    ................
00080090: e3820080 e1210080 e3cf0080 e2820080    ......!.........
000800a0: e4920080 e1320080 1aff0080 ee070080    ......2.........
000800b0: ee070080 ee110080 e3c00080 e3c00080    ................
000800c0: ee010080 e3a00080 00000080 00000080    ................
000800d0: 00000080 00000080 00000080 00000080    ................
000800e0: e28f0080 e8900080 e0500080 e3300080    ..........P...0.
000800f0: 0a000080 e0850080 e0860080 e08c0080    ................

Notice how the high-order 16 bits of each long word are always "0080"?  
This is completely bogus.  However, flash has not actually been 
corrupted.  If I do a reset, and then do an "md 8000", everything is 
perfectly right.

Now don't get me wrong - I hardly expect you u-boot experts to "debug my 
program".  It's just that this is SO strange, I hardly know where to 
start.  Please just toss me one small bone here and answer this 
question:  What could possibly be going on here?  Is the NE2000 driver 
messing up the memory controller, or is it something else?  By the way, 
after the "ping" is done the PXA register settings continue to look 
good, so I doubt if it's a register-related problem.  But then again, 
maybe I'm missing something.

Please let me know what you think - I'm pretty stuck at the moment.

Thanks in advance,
craig vanderborgh
voxware incorporated