Re: Broadcom BCM5901 NIC

David Härdeman
2003-09-28T00:06:01Z

Hi,

I tried unplugging/plugging the cable a few times along with ifup and
ifdown a few times in different variations. It didnt seem to do much,
one interesting thing that I noticed was that the Windows XP host that
this laptop was connected to with a crossover cable during the testing
reported the link as being down when the NIC was ifup'ed and vice versa.

After being bored with ifup/down and cable pulling I tried some
modprobe/rmmod as well. This proptly hosed the system, the "ifconfig
eth0 down" command is frozen, unkillable and consumes 100% CPU right
now. ifconfig on another console to check if the card "is still there"
also froze. Well, at least the network led woke up, its on constantly
right now :-)

Ideas?

//David

PS
With the tg3 driver the card is reported as a 33Mhz PCI card, with the
bcm5700 it's reported as a 66Mhz PCI card, could this make a
difference?

On Sat, Sep 27, 2003 at 07:28:02PM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>David Härdeman wrote:
>>Hi,
>>
>>my new laptop (IBM Thinkpad G40) has an integrated NIC made by broadcom.
>>It's a BCM5901 card for which support was added in the tg3 driver a few
>>weeks ago (both in 2.4 and 2.6-test). However, the device doesn't work,
>>it insmods just fine and claims the hardware, but the machine never
>>responds to ping messages and the led indicating network activity is
>>never activated.
>>
>>Broadcom has released a driver of their own (bcm5700) which works with
>>kernel 2.4.21. When I try that combination it works fine, however, the
>>bcm5700 driver wont work at all on recent 2.4 or 2.6 kernels.
>>
>>Does anyone know what is wrong with the tg3 driver? Has anyone tried
>>using it on a 5901 card with success?
>
>
>Trying unplugging/plugging the cable, or ifdown+ifup cycle, and let me
>know if that fixes things.
>
> Jeff
>
>