Thursday,  February 7, 2001

Hello,

After discovering a few days ago that the oem PC-Tel software modem in my Cyrix 266 eMachine is not supported by NetBSD-1.5 (thanks again to Kevin P. Neal and Mike Pelley), I bought another modem, which also perhaps doesn't work on NetBSD-1.5 i386 GENERIC:

dmesg | grep 'AT&T'
AT&T Microelectronics LTMODEM at pci0 dev 19 function 0 (not configured)

The second modem is a Zoom 56K V.90 pci marked model 1120M.  The documentation says that this modem has a built in 16550 UART and a programmable flash rom DSP, which are the parts that I thought were "missing" from the PC-Tel modem.  As Mike Pelley suggested, I looked at pcidevs, which has vendor code 0x11c1 for AT&T Microelectronics and almost fifty lines of product numbers for LTMODEM devices.  

Under Windows 98, replacing my previous PC-Tel modem with the new Zoom modem resulted in an approximately 50% increase in download speed, even though both modems are nominally 56K.   The significantly increased performace together with what I thought were enough chips and finding AT&T LTMODEM in pcidevs raised my hopes that the Zoom modem would work on NetBSD.  

 Here is additional information from labels and chips on the Zoom modem:

Paper label on circuit board (no bar code):
56K PCI FAXMODEM MODEL 1120M
FCC Reg # BDNUSA-33104-M5-E

Bar coded paper label on circuit board:
V00080510414 SO#67850

Another bar coded paper label on circuit board:
V56706-RC

Paper label on metal mounting bracket:
Industrie Canada 15359226A

Printing on chip:
Lucent V90P
T-RECV
0028S 3545543
Copyright 1998 LUCENT

Printing on another chip:
Lucent 1034 C-J
0027T
64726741

Printing on another chip:
04BY
NO5A [maybe N05A]

Printing on another chip:
QTC
4N35
0012K

Printing on another chip:
T  0E
P627

Printing on another chip:
-   +
 DC
~  ~

Printing on small, round, bright metal object:
C-221184M

Here are the questions I have:

(1)  Will the Zoom modem will work on NetBSD-1.5 i386?  If yes, what needs to be done so the kernel finds it to be properly configured?  If no, what is the hardware that is "missing" (apparently not a UART or a DSP)?

(2)  How can one tell which pci modems will work with NetBSD-1.5 and which will not?   

(3)  What about the new V.92 pci modems -- I could have bought one of several -- are these okay with NetBSD-1.5?

(4)  I have been told that *all* external modems are "hardware" modems and so will work with NetBSD.  Is this correct?

(5) Is there something in NetBSD documentation or elsewhere that explains these issues which I should have read but didn't find?

Thanks so much!

Tom

thomas.miller@lycos.com 
(Thomas Miller)
(617) 248-8900

Any following text may include a message which was added by Lycos and which is not a communication from me.





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