e1000 with serdes only shows a fiber port

e1000 with serdes only shows a fiber port

[Pierre Ossman]

Hi!

I'm having problems with the e1000 card in a Dell Poweredge 1855. This
model has support for both copper and fiber and has two cards on the PCI
bus (might supposed to be one for each type).

The problem is that both of these cards show only FIBER as a supported
port type, but I only have plain copper connectors attached to the
machine. There is no link detected at either end, except for a small
flicker just when the e1000 module is loaded.

The hardware doesn't seem to be the problem since it works nicely in
Windows on the same machine.

The device id of both controllers is 8086:107b, meaning SERDES. However,
if I look into e1000_ethtool.c:e1000_get_settings() I can see a test for
copper media, then and else assuming that the card is a fiber card.
Since this card can do both I'm guessing this code is broken.

I'm in rather desperate here since this is a blade server (i.e. no
chance of putting in another network card). :/

Rgds
Pierre

lspci:

05:04.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82546GB Gigabit Ethernet
Controller (rev 03)
        Subsystem: Dell: Unknown device 018a
        Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 185
        Memory at fe7e0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
        I/O ports at dcc0 [size=64]
        Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2
        Capabilities: [e4] PCI-X non-bridge device.
        Capabilities: [f0] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit+
Queue=0/0 Enable-

05:04.1 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82546GB Gigabit Ethernet
Controller (rev 03)
        Subsystem: Dell: Unknown device 018a
        Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 193
        Memory at fe7c0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
        I/O ports at dc80 [size=64]
        Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2
        Capabilities: [e4] PCI-X non-bridge device.
        Capabilities: [f0] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit+
Queue=0/0 Enable-

ethtool: (eth1 is identical)

Settings for eth0:
        Supported ports: [ FIBRE ]
        Supported link modes:   1000baseT/Full
        Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
        Advertised link modes:  1000baseT/Full
        Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
        Speed: Unknown! (65535)
        Duplex: Unknown! (255)
        Port: FIBRE
        PHYAD: 0
        Transceiver: internal
        Auto-negotiation: off
        Supports Wake-on: umbg
        Wake-on: d
        Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)
        Link detected: no

Re: e1000 with serdes only shows a fiber port

[Paul Rolland]

Hello,

> The device id of both controllers is 8086:107b, meaning 
> SERDES. However,
> if I look into e1000_ethtool.c:e1000_get_settings() I can see 
> a test for
> copper media, then and else assuming that the card is a fiber card.
> Since this card can do both I'm guessing this code is broken.

I think it simply means the card can only operate one of the two
modes at one time...

> Settings for eth0:
>         Supported ports: [ FIBRE ]
>         Supported link modes:   1000baseT/Full
>         Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
>         Advertised link modes:  1000baseT/Full
>         Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
>         Speed: Unknown! (65535)
>         Duplex: Unknown! (255)
>         Port: FIBRE
>         PHYAD: 0
>         Transceiver: internal
>         Auto-negotiation: off
>         Supports Wake-on: umbg
>         Wake-on: d
>         Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)
>         Link detected: no

Did you try something like :
ethtool -s eth0 port tp
or
ethtool -s eth0 port mii

as the man page for ethtool says :
       port tp|aui|bnc|mii
              Select device port.

and ethtool indicates it supports :
        ethtool -s DEVNAME \
                [ speed 10|100|1000 ] \
                [ duplex half|full ]    \
                [ port tp|aui|bnc|mii|fibre ] \
where fibre is what you have selected right now (from your report...)

Paul

Re: e1000 with serdes only shows a fiber port

[John Ronciak]

On 3/13/06, Pierre Ossman <drzeus-list@drzeus.cx> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I'm having problems with the e1000 card in a Dell Poweredge 1855. This
> model has support for both copper and fiber and has two cards on the PCI
> bus (might supposed to be one for each type).

If it's a blade server blade then it's really not fiber or copper
(i.e. no PHY), it's a serdes connection to the backplane in the blade
server.  I have never seen one of these not always have link (if the
blade is plugged into the backplane it must have link).

So what versions of things are you running?  OS? Driver?  Version
number of the blade?  BIOS (must have the latest)?  Windows doesn't
use the BIOS but does everything itself regarding HW setup.

Did you go back to Dell for support on this?  What did they say?  Are
you using a version of Linux that Dell supports on this hardware? 
There might need to be some special drivers that are needed which Dell
supplies with their versions for specific HW.  I'm not a blade server
expert but I've seen things like this before.

One suggestion is to disable auto-negotiation and force the link to 1
gigabit full duplex to see what that does.

Let us know.

--
Cheers,
John

Re: e1000 with serdes only shows a fiber port

[Pierre Ossman]

John Ronciak wrote:
> On 3/13/06, Pierre Ossman <drzeus-list@drzeus.cx> wrote:
>   
>> Hi!
>>
>> I'm having problems with the e1000 card in a Dell Poweredge 1855. This
>> model has support for both copper and fiber and has two cards on the PCI
>> bus (might supposed to be one for each type).
>>     
>
> If it's a blade server blade then it's really not fiber or copper
> (i.e. no PHY), it's a serdes connection to the backplane in the blade
> server.  I have never seen one of these not always have link (if the
> blade is plugged into the backplane it must have link).
>
> So what versions of things are you running?  OS? Driver?  Version
> number of the blade?  BIOS (must have the latest)?  Windows doesn't
> use the BIOS but does everything itself regarding HW setup.
>   

I have tried Linux 2.6.11 and 2.6.15. I've also tried the independent
variant of the driver, version 6.3.9 and 7.0.33. We've also tried Dell's
version for RHEL4 (5.7.6.1).

BIOS has been confirmed to be the latest version.

> Did you go back to Dell for support on this?  What did they say?  Are
> you using a version of Linux that Dell supports on this hardware? 
>   

We haven't contacted Dell at this point no. Partly because we run Fedora
Core and not one of the supported dists (this will be a terminal server
so we want a more recent desktop on it).

> There might need to be some special drivers that are needed which Dell
> supplies with their versions for specific HW.  I'm not a blade server
> expert but I've seen things like this before.
>
> One suggestion is to disable auto-negotiation and force the link to 1
> gigabit full duplex to see what that does.
>
>   

We started doing this and discovered that the card started working when
we plugged it into a gigabit port (copper). ethtool still says fiber
though. So the immediate panic has settled. :)

It would still be nice to plug this into a 100 Mbps port since the
gigabit ports are a bit scarce.

Rgds
Pierre