Re: Extend smc911x to support LAN921x chips - differences?

[Guennadi Liakhovetski <g.liakhovetski@gmx.de>]

On Tue, 9 Sep 2008, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have to support the LAN9215 chip from SMSC under Linux. Of course, there 
> is the manufacturer provided smsc911x driver, that supports both chip 
> families, but I would prefer to extend the mainline smc911x driver to also 
> support 921x. I have both datasheets, they are freely downloadable from 
> SMSC site, and I have both drivers, but they are absolutely different. To 
> make my decision and the work easier - maybe someone knows from the top of 
> their head, what the relevant differences between the chips are?
> 
> The vendor driver does not really differentiate between the chips. It does 
> read the chip version, and sets the "generation" variable, but then that 
> variable is only used once to rule out the oldest chips, which anyway are 
> not supported by smc911x. So I tried the in-kernel driver with only added 
> chip IDs added, it can access registers, read and write the MAC-address, 
> interrupts are generated too, but so far I see nothing on the wire, and 
> the PHY reports "link down".

No, I was wrong here, it does detect the link and performs 
autonegotiation, that doesn't seem to be the problem... Still, no clue 
what's wrong though:-(

Thanks
Guennadi
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Guennadi Liakhovetski, Ph.D.
Freelance Open-Source Software Developer