Subject: status of BICC isolan NIC's in current (1.3K)
To: None <port-i386@netbsd.org, current-users@netbsd.org>
From: Dave Tyson <Dave.Tyson@liverpool.ac.uk>
List: current-users
Date: 03/24/1999 10:19:01
Brian Grayson recently mailed port-i386 about support for the BICC
isolan card. This is listed in all the recent i386 installation notes
as 'not recently tested'. Since I have one of these ancient cards in
a DOS network monitor I decided to test it under current as of a couple
of days ago: 

NETBSD 1.3K (DAVE) #0: Tue Mar 23 22:51:23 GMT 1999
    root@splunge:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/DAVE
cpu0: Intel 486DX (486-class)
real mem  = 33161216
avail mem = 27328512
using 430 buffers containing 1761280 bytes of memory
mainbus0 (root)
pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0: configuration mode 1
pci0: i/o enabled, memory enabled
pchb0 at pci0 dev 5 function 0
pchb0: Acer M1435 VL-PCI Bridge (rev. 0x00)
isa0 at mainbus0
... bits deleted ...
bicc0 at isa0 port 0x280-0x28f irq 10 drq 7
le0 at bicc0: BICC Isolan Ethernet
le0: address 08:00:4e:03:4d:66
le0: 8 receive buffers, 2 transmit buffers
... bits deleted ...
boot device: sd0
root on sd0a dumps on sd0b
root file system type: ffs
le0: overflow
... bits deleted ...
le0: overflow
le0: overflow
le0: excessive collisions, tdr 5
le0: overflow
le0: overflow
le0: overflow
le0: transmitter disabled
le0: excessive collisions, tdr 4
le0: overflow
le0: excessive collisions, tdr 4
le0: excessive collisions, tdr 4
le0: overflow
le0: overflow
le0: transmitter disabled

It works after a fashion. Large ftp transfers jam the card and you
need to do a 'ifconfig le0 down/ifconfig le0 up'. Its fine for telnet
and other light traffic. The code could be fixed, but I suspect that
these are pretty rare cards and there are lots of better cheap NIC's.

So the installation notes could be changed to 'BICC isolan: works, but
flakey and not recommended'

Dave

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