20090402

More PC Card enhancements

Every few months/years I take all the cards that I have in my collection and start to run through them testing to see what's working in FreeBSD and what's broken. Over the past year or two I've neglected this task as I've been involved in other things. After my last trip to Akihabara, I've been playing with this stuff, so I thought I'd pull out the cards again. However, for the moment, I'm restricting things to the cards supported by the ed driver.

I've already blogged about the AX88x90 enhancements. The only additional enhancement is that I've eliminated some code that duplicates reading the NIC from what is just memory. I'll be committing that soon.

I've finally implemented the workaround for fullduplex disabling SQE in the DL10019 parts. This gives slightly better performance on the parts that are affected, but I'm having trouble measuring it. I'm not sure that it is worth the hassle.

I've also made a number of cards work by tweaking the MII initialization. I think I have a good way to kick the PHYs that are on these cards to get them working (this has helped to get three cards going).

I'm approaching 100% of the ne-2000ish cards working. I'll do a final cleanup of my patches and try to get them into the tree. It is time to move on to the CardBus cards. Most of them appear to work, once certain resource allocation issues are addressed. At the very least I need to test them all to see how they work. I may skip this and move directly and address the resource issues there.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

By chance does this include Xircom cards that seem to be plagued by changes to the cardbus_cis.c file? There seems to be a lot on the web about issues that people are having with them and the newer versions of FreeBSD. Just recently I saw something fly across the -stable mailing list about this.

Warner Losh said...

That's on the list. I don't think I'll make 7.2-Release, however. The patches in the bug on this do work, but aren't quite right since it they rely on some undocumented behavior to work.