on 3/27/00 10:43 PM, Chris Tribo at talon16m@hotmail.com wrote:

> on 3/27/00 6:09 PM, Thilo Manske at Thilo.Manske@HEH.Uni-Oldenburg.DE wrote
> something like:
[...]
>> As you may guess it was a really big PITA to get NetBSD on this machine.
>> Especially since it has no onboard NIC and the latest current-snapshot I
>> have used didn't support PCI NICs like the ex, epic, rl or vr I have lying
>> around or could borrow from one of my other boxen.
> 
> You could probably get a hold of a Tulip based card from Ebay for a few
> bucks if you don't need to netboot the machine. Otherwise, I think Asante,
> 3COM and maybe Microsense are the only NICs that have OF support available.
> (I'm just guessing, if anyone knows this would be good FAQ / OF FAQ info)

My AsanteFast ethernet card (Rev A) doesn't appear to have an OF driver.

Note that there are two revisions of the AsanteFast card.  Rev A is based on
the DEC 21140, works with the "tulip" driver in LinuxPPC and the "de*"
driver in NetBSD, and even works with the Apple drivers built into MacOS 9.
(Presumably Apple has shipped something based on this chip at some point,
and thus includes drivers for it.)

The Rev B AsanteFast card is based on a completely different chipset which
doesn't work with Apple's MacOS drivers and wasn't recognized by LinuxPPC at
all the last time I checked.  It also requires a completely different Asante
installer for MacOS drivers.  I got rid of the Rev B card I had before I got
NetBSD running, so I don't know if NetBSD likes it any better.

According to a message I found in the linux-tulip development mailing list
archive, Asante decided to switch from the DEC chip to something called the
"Lite-on PNIC" due to supply problems with the 21140 chipset:

http://beowulf.gsfc.nasa.gov/listarchives/linux-tulip/1999/06/0014.html

As it happens, I was looking at Farallon's web page on their fast ethernet
cards today, and I noticed that the "Drivers Supported" section claims
"Open FirmWare, Open Transport & NDIS, ODI Ethernet".  Can anyone confirm
that the Farallon cards have a functional OF driver?  Also, does anyone
know which chipset these cards use, and whether they are supported under
NetBSD?

http://www.farallon.com/products/fast/cards/fecards.html

-- monroe
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monroe Williams                                         monroe@pobox.com