Re: r8169 driver problem with RTL8110SB chip (on iop3xx ARM board)

[Francois Romieu <romieu@fr.zoreil.com>]

Lennert Buytenhek <buytenh@wantstofly.org> :
[...]
> We're currently working on getting the Thecus n2100 supported in 2.6.
> 
> 	http://www.thecus.com/products_over.php?cid=1&pid=1

I should really write some wish-list one day...

> Amongst other nice goodies, it has two on-board RTL8110SB gigabit
> controllers.  The realtek-supplied 'r1000' driver kind of sort of works,

Ok. That's good to know.

> The in-kernel 'r8169' drivers in 2.6.17 and 2.6.18-rc2 appear to work
> initially, but they don't actually seem to transmit any packets on the
> wire, nor do they receive any.
> 
> Boot logs from 2.6.17 and 2.6.18-rc2 attached.  Apart from the MAC
> address for eth1 being incorrect (boot loader bug, being worked on)
> there don't seem to be any strange messages or errors.

Can you send:
- the output of 'lspci -vvx' 
- the content of /proc/interrupts
- an ethtool dump of the registers. I don't know if Realtek's driver support
  but it can help even the in-kernel driver

> It doesn't seem to be a PHY configuration issue -- with a custom program
> to dump the MDIO registers (is there any reason r8169 doesn't support
> mii-tool, by the way?  will you take a patch to add that?), we get the

I had written it once, with some rework of the mii functions in the driver.
It was hit by conflicts generated by various changes as well as higher
priority bugs/features requests. You can send your code or I can resurrect
it at your option.

[...]
> Just wondering if you've seen this kind of behavior before before I dig
> into it further?  I'm pretty sure the hardware is okay, since r1000 works,
> and the on-board SATA and UHCI/EHCI USB work fine as well.

I have had a few success reports with the 8110 (and failures too, see
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5284) but I have not received
reports for this behavior lately. Complete lack of Rx/Tx activity have
been observed due to some irq problems. It does not seem to be the issue
here.

-- 
Ueimor