I have two non-critical problems with my ne-using PCMCIA ethernet card.
The first is one that I've mentioned before; it seems that near the end
of the last function in the PCMCIA ne driver .c file, the if() test fails
and {rv} is never set to 0.  This causes the device to fail to probe/attach.
Setting the {rv} forcefully to 0 solves this problem.  (There's a PR on this
with the hack pointed out.)  I am curious if anyone can explain:

 (a) What the test is trying to accomplish.

 (b) How difficult it would be to introduce a driver quirk entry to cause
     my particular PCMCIA card to get around this test without removing the
     (presumably useful) test for other cards.


The second problem is: While effectively removing the test gets rid of the
problem for me, I tend to get a bunch of

  /netbsd ne0: warning - receiver ring buffer overrun

...error messages.  These seem to be coming from .../src/dev/ic/dp8390.c

One thing that I notice is that in the ne2000.c file, there's a
/* XXX really? */ next to the claim that the 88190 chipset has 16K
memory (this is the type that my card comes up as).  Could it be that my
card only has 8K memory, hence the overruns?  (No, I haven't yet tried
just changing that line, but I thought that I'd ask...I assume that there
is little harm in moving that line to the 8K case.  I guess that I'll go
build a test kernel after I send this.  (^&)

The overruns cause a certain amount of lost network performance, so it
would be nice to fix this if possible.  (I mostly notice this in XMMS,
playing from an NFS-mounted directory of Ogg Vorbis files.  Directory
scans are slow, and periodically playing files pause for about a second
when an overrun occurs.)

Or, is this just a "known problem" with this chipset and I'll just have
to live with overruns or get a new NIC?


Well, off to hack the driver and see if an 8K buffer fixes my problem.  (^&

Thanks in advance.


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/