EC(4) | Device Drivers Manual | EC(4) |
ec
—
ec0 at isa? port 0x250 iomem 0xd8000 irq 9
ec
device driver supports 3Com EtherLink II (3c503)
Ethernet cards for ISA bus which are based on the National Semiconductor
DP8390/WD83C690 Ethernet interface chips.
To enable the AUI media, select the 10base5 or
aui media type with
ifconfig(8)'s
media
directive. To select the other media (BNC or
UTP), select the 10base2 or bnc media
type.
The IRQ was wildcarded in the kernel configuration file. This is not supported.
An IRQ other than the above IRQ values was specified in the kernel configuration file. The EtherLink II hardware only supports the above listed IRQ values.
The memory test was unable to clear shared the interface's shared memory region. This often indicates that the card is configured at a conflicting iomem address.
The DP8390 Ethernet chip used by this board implements a shared-memory ring-buffer to store incoming packets. The 3c503 usually has only 8K bytes of shared memory. This is only enough room for about 4 full-size (1500 byte) packets. This can sometimes be a problem, especially on the original 3c503, because these boards' shared-memory access speed is quite slow; typically only about 1MB/second. The overhead of this slow memory access, and the fact that there is only room for 4 full-sized packets means that the ring-buffer will occasionally overrun.
When an overrun occurs, the board must be reset to avoid a lockup problem in early revision DP8390 Ethernet chips. Resetting the board causes all of the data in the ring-buffer to be lost, requiring the data to be retransmitted/received, congesting the board further. Because of this, maximum throughput on these boards is only about 400-600K bytes per second.
This problem is exacerbated by NFS because the 8-bit boards
lack sufficient packet buffer memory to support the default 8K byte
packets that NFS and other protocols use as their default. If these
cards must be used with NFS, use the
mount_nfs(8)
-r
and -w
options in
/etc/fstab to limit NFS's packet size. 4K (4096)
byte packets generally work.
October 20, 1997 | NetBSD 9.4 |