I finally got around to trying my ISA DEPCA card in a PC (350 MHz 
PII) running NetBSD/i386 1.5.2 and thought I'd post the results and 
ask for comments.  My card prints this on the console just after the 
BIOS finishes detecting the hard disks:

DE202 82
DEPCA ROM Version 04.01.003

I uncommented these lines

depca0 at isa? port 0x300 iomem 0xc8000 iosiz 0x8000 irq 5     # DEPCA
le*     at depca?

in the GENERIC kernel configuration file and built a new kernel.  The 
kernel's probing messages for the card were:

depca0 at isa0 port 0x300-0x30f iomem 0xc8000-0xcffff irq 5
le0 at depca0
le0: address 08:00:2b:36:a0:da
le0: 16 receive buffers, 4 transmit buffers

When I tried to ftp a large file from another NetBSD machine on my 
local network using that kernel I was disappointed to find the 
maximum transfer rate was only about 550 KB/s, plus this message 
popped up a few times during the session:

le0 dropping chained buffer.

Next I tried using the card's 64 KB memory size by changing the depca 
line in the configuration file to:

depca0  at isa? port 0x300 iomem 0xd0000 iosiz 0x10000 irq 5    # DEPCA

building another kernel and altering the card's DIP switches to 
match.  I thought the extra RAM might increase the speed but it 
didn't, and the "dropping chained buffer" messages didn't go away.

With this second configuration the kernel's probing messages were:

depca0 at isa0 port 0x300-0x30f iomem 0xd0000-0xdffff irq 5
le0 at depca0
le0: address 08:00:2b:36:a0:da
le0: 32 receive buffers, 8 transmit buffers

I'd hoped this card would give transfer rates close to 10 Mbps since 
that's what I get from the DEC network card built into my Alpha 
3000/400 which also uses the le driver.  Perhaps that hardware's 
quite different?


Ray