Re. http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-help/2003/10/08/0019.html

I have a PCMCIA card that used to do something similar, except I think that
mine would (literally) alternate between ne1 and ne2.  on a cold boot, I think
that it came up as ne2.  Warm boot to ne1.  Warmboot again to ne2, ...
Power off, power back on, cold boot to ne2...

It would WORK at ne2, but was dead at ne1.

This was under NetBSD/i386 1.5.  Someone suggested a kernel config to wire it
down and my problems went away.

Under 1.6, it seems to work at ne0...


...EXCEPT that the kernel fails to probe it correctly.  (There's an old PR that
I filed on that...)

The problem in 1.6 (and -current) is that the code does a test near the end
of the attach, AFTER it has already printed kernel messages about probing and
finding the card.  The *very* last test fails, and it the kernel prints a
new message declaring that it doesn't know what the card is, after all.

Because this is weird, and the driver worked (sort of) in 1.5 I
just hacked the kernel to ignore the last test's results.  Now it
works.  (Though I get lots of ring buffer overruns---I'm not sure
if I had that before---it is infinitely better than how it was on
a stock 1.6 system: Dead.)

I don't think that mine is a RealTek, but I don't have it up at the moment.


I don't know if any of that helps you at all.  There may be no relation to
what I experienced, but there are at least superficial similarities.


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