The only thing that one needs to use an ethernet card with Linux is the appropriate driver. For this, it is essential that the manufacturer will release the technical programming information to the general public without you (or anyone) having to sign your life away. A good guide for the likelihood of getting documentation (or, if you aren't writing code, the likelihood that someone else will write that driver you really, really need) is the availability of the Crynwr (nee Clarkson) packet driver. Russ Nelson runs this operation, and has been very helpful in supporting the development of drivers for Linux. Net-surfers can try this URL to look up Russ' software.
Given the documentation, you can write a driver for your card and use it for Linux (at least in theory) and if you intend to write a driver, have a look at Skeleton driver as well. Keep in mind that some old hardware that was designed for XT type machines will not function very well in a multitasking environment such as Linux. Use of these will lead to major problems if your network sees a reasonable amount of traffic.
Most cards come with drivers for MS-DOS interfaces such as NDIS and ODI, but these are useless for Linux. Many people have suggested directly linking them in or automatic translation, but this is nearly impossible. The MS-DOS drivers expect to be in 16 bit mode and hook into `software interrupts', both incompatible with the Linux kernel. This incompatibility is actually a feature, as some Linux drivers are considerably better than their MS-DOS counterparts. The `8390' series drivers, for instance, use ping-pong transmit buffers, which are only now being introduced in the MS-DOS world.
Keep in mind that PC ethercards have the widest variety of interfaces (shared memory, programmed I/O, bus-master, or slave DMA) of any computer hardware for anything, and supporting a new ethercard sometimes requires re-thinking most of the lower-level networking code. (If you are interested in learning more about these different forms of interfaces, see Programmed I/O vs. ... .)
Also, similar product numbers don't always indicate similar products. For instance, the 3c50* product line from 3Com varies wildly between different members.
Enough talk. Let's get down to the information you want.
If you are not sure what your card is, but you think it is a 3Com card, you can probably figure it out from the assembly number. 3Com has a document `Identifying 3Com Adapters By Assembly Number' (ref 24500002) that would most likely clear things up. See Technical Information from 3Com for info on how to get documents from 3Com.
Also note that 3Com has a FTP site with various goodies:
ftp.3Com.com that you may want to check out.
Status -- Semi-Supported
Too brain-damaged to use. Available surplus from many places. Avoid it like the plague. Again, do not purchase this card, even as a joke. It's performance is horrible, and it breaks in many ways.
Cameron L. Spitzer of 3Com said: ``I'm speaking only for myself here, of course, but I believe 3Com advises against installing a 3C501 in a new system, mostly for the same reasons Donald has discussed. You probably won't be happy with the 3C501 in your Linux box. The data sheet is marked `(obsolete)' on 3Com's Developers' Order Form, and the board is not part of 3Com's program for sending free Technical Reference Manuals to people who need them. The decade-old things are nearly indestructible, but that's about all they've got going for them any more.''
For those not yet convinced, the 3c501 can only do one thing at a time -- while you are removing one packet from the single-packet buffer it cannot receive another packet, nor can it receive a packet while loading a transmit packet. This was fine for a network between two 8088-based computers where processing each packet and replying took 10's of msecs, but modern networks send back-to-back packets for almost every transaction.
AutoIRQ works, DMA isn't used, the autoprobe only
looks at 0x280 and 0x300, and the debug level is set
with the third boot-time argument.
Once again, the use of a 3c501 is strongly discouraged! Even more so with a IP multicast kernel, as you will grind to a halt while listening to all multicast packets. See the comments at the top of the source code for more details.
Status -- Supported
3Com shared-memory ethercards. They also have a programmed I/O mode that doesn't use the 8390 facilities (their engineers found too many bugs!) It should be about the same speed as the same bus width WD80x3, Unless you are a light user, spend the extra money and get the 16 bit model, as the price difference isn't significant. The 3c503 does not have ``EEPROM setup'', so the diagnostic/setup program isn't needed before running the card with Linux. The shared memory address of the 3c503 is set using jumpers that are shared with the boot PROM address. This is confusing to people familiar with other ISA cards, where you always leave the jumper set to ``disable'' unless you have a boot PROM.
Note that recently made 3c503/16 cards have a new base hardware address because 3Com ran out of numbers (they made too many cards!) The cards used to start with 02 60 8C and the newer ones use 00 20 AF. The driver (as of 1.2.8) will only check for the old address, and skip over the newer cards. For now, just change the numbers in 3c503.c if you have a newer card.
The Linux 3c503 driver can also work with the 3c503 programmed-I/O mode, but this is slower and less reliable than shared memory mode. Also, programmed-I/O mode is not tested when updating the drivers, the deadman (deadcard?) check code may falsely timeout on some machines, and the probe for a 3c503 in programmed-I/O mode is turned off by default in some versions of the kernel. This was a panic reaction to the general device driver probe explosion; the 3c503 shared memory probe is a safe read from memory, rather than an extensive scan through I/O space. As of 0.99pl13, the kernel has an I/O port registrar that makes I/O space probes safer, and the programmed-I/O 3c503 probe has been re-enabled. You still shouldn't use the programmed-I/O mode though, unless you need it for MS-DOS compatibility.
The 3c503's IRQ line is set in software, with no hints from an EEPROM. Unlike the MS-DOS drivers, the Linux driver has capability to autoIRQ: it uses the first available IRQ line in {5,2/9,3,4}, selected each time the card is ifconfig'ed. (Older driver versions selected the IRQ at boot time.) The ioctl() call in `ifconfig' will return EAGAIN if no IRQ line is available at that time.
Some common problems that people have with the 503 are discussed in Problems with... .
Status -- Semi-Supported
This is a driver that was written by Craig Southeren
geoffw@extro.ucc.su.oz.au. These cards also
use the i82586 chip.
There are not that many of these cards about.
It is included in the standard kernel, but it is classed as
an alpha driver. See
Alpha Drivers
for important information on using alpha-test ethernet drivers
with Linux.
There is also the file
/usr/src/linux/drivers/net/README.3c505
that you should read if you are going to use one of these cards.
It contains various options that you can enable/disable.
Technical information is available in
Programming the Intel chips
.
Status -- Semi-Supported
This card uses one of the Intel chips, and the development of the driver is closely related to the development of the Intel Ether Express driver. The driver is included in the standard kernel release, but as an alpha driver.
See Alpha Drivers for important information on using alpha-test ethernet drivers with Linux. Technical information is available in Programming the Intel chips .
Status -- Supported
It's fairly inexpensive and has excellent performance for a non-bus-master design. The drawbacks are that the original 3c509 _requires_ very low interrupt latency. The 3c509B shouldn't suffer from the same problem, due to having a larger buffer. (See below.)
Note that the ISA card detection uses a different method
than most cards. Basically, you ask the cards to respond
by sending data to an ID_PORT (port 0x100). Note that
if you have some other strange ISA card using an I/O range
that includes the ID_PORT of the 3c509, it will probably
not get detected. Note that you can change the ID_PORT to
0x110 or 0x120 or... in 3c509.c if you have
a conflicting ISA card, and the 3c509 will still be happy.
Also note that this detection method means that
it is difficult to predict which card will get detected first
in a multiple ISA 3c509 configuration.
The card with the lowest hardware ethernet address
will end up being eth0. This shouldn't matter
to anyone, except for those people who want to assign
a 6 byte hardware address to a particular interface.
A working 3c509 driver was first included as an alpha-test version in the 0.99pl13 kernel sources. It is now in the standard kernel.
The original 3c509 has a tiny Rx buffer (2kB), causing the driver to
occasionally drop a packet if interrupts are masked for
too long. To minimize this problem, you can try unmasking
interrupts during IDE disk transfers (see hdparm(8)) and/or
increasing your ISA bus speed so IDE transfers finish sooner.
(Note that the driver could
be completely rewritten to use predictive interrupts,
but performance re-writes of working drivers are low
priority unless there is some particular incentive or
need.)
Cameron Spitzer writes: ``Beware that if you put a '509 in EISA addressing mode by mistake and save that in the EEPROM, you'll have to use an EISA machine or the infamous Test Via to get it back to normal, and it will conflict at IO location 0 which may hang your ISA machine. I believe this problem is corrected in the 3C509B version of the board.''
The newer model 3c509B has 8kB on board, and the driver can set 4, 5 or 6kB for an Rx buffer. This setting can also be stored on the EEPROM. This should alleviate the above problem with the original 3c509. At this point in time, the Linux driver is not aware of this, and treats the 3c509B as an older 3c509.
3c509B users should use the supplied DOS
utility to disable the plug and play support, and
to set the output media to what they require.
Cameron adds:
``The 3C509B has 3Com's relocatable I/O port scheme,
and Microsoft
It was a marketing decision to turn PnP on as a factory default setting. If it caused you a hassle, or not, please take the time to say so when you mail in your warranty card. The more info they have, the better decisions they can make. Also, check with your motherboard supplier to see if you need a BIOS upgrade.''
Status -- Not Supported
This MCA bus card uses the i82586, and now that people are actually running Linux on MCA machines, someone may wish to try and recycle parts of the 3c507 driver into a driver for this card.
Status -- Not Supported
Yes, another MCA card. No, not too much interest in it. Better chances with the 3c523 or the 3c529.
Status -- Not Supported
This card actually uses the same chipset as the 3c509. Donald actually put hooks into the 3c509 driver to check for MCA cards after probing for EISA cards, and before probing for ISA cards. But it hasn't evolved much further than that. Donald writes:
``I don't have access to a MCA machine (nor do I fully understand
the probing code) so I never wrote the mca_adaptor_select_mode()
or mca_adaptor_id() routines. If you can find a way to get the
adaptor I/O address that assigned at boot time, you can just
hard-wire that in place of the commented-out probe. Be sure to
keep the code that reads the IRQ, if_port, and ethernet address.''
Status -- Supported
The EISA version of the 509. The current EISA version uses the same 16 bit wide chip rather than a 32 bit interface, so the performance increase isn't stunning. The EISA probe code was added to 3c509.c for 0.99pl14. We would be interested in hearing progress reports from any 3c579 users. (Read the above 3c509 section for info on the driver.)
Cameron Spitzer writes: ``The 3C579 (Etherlink III EISA) should be configured as an EISA card. The IO Base Address (window 0 register 6 bits 4:0) should be 1f, which selects EISA addressing mode. Logic outside the ASIC decodes the IO address s000, where s is the slot number. I don't think it was documented real well. Except for its IO Base Address, the '579 should behave EXACTLY like the'509 (EL3 ISA), and if it doesn't, I want to hear about it (at my work address).''
Status -- Semi-Supported
Many people have been using this PCMCIA card for quite some time now. Note that support for it is not (at present) included in the default kernel source tree. You will also need a supported PCMCIA controller chipset. There are drivers available on Donald's ftp site:
cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov:/pub/linux/pcmcia/README.3c589
cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov:/pub/linux/pcmcia/3c589.c
cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov:/pub/linux/pcmcia/dbether.c
Or for those that are net-surfing you can try:
You will still need a PCMCIA socket enabler as well.
See PCMCIA Support for more info on PCMCIA chipsets, socket enablers, etc.
The "B" in the name means the same here as it does for the 3c509 case.
Status -- Semi-Supported
These ``Vortex'' cards are for PCI bus machines, with the '590 being 10Mbps and the '595 being 3Com's 100Mbs offering. As of 23/03/95 Donald had 2 of the '595 cards set up in a point to point link. (Nobody is shipping 100Mbps hubs yet!) The performance of the '595 is far below the theoretical maximum at the moment, but hopefully that will change with time. The driver should appear in the 1.3.x kernel, when that appears, but you can have a look now at the following URL:
3Com is offering an evaluation deal where you get 2 '595 cards for a total price of $250 at the moment. Also note that you can run the '595 as a '590 (i.e. in a 10Mbps mode).
A thanks to Cameron Spitzer and Terry Murphy of 3Com for sending cards and documentation to Donald so he could write the driver.
Status -- Supported
Don't let the name fool you. This is still supposed to be a NE2000 compatible card. The MPX is supposed to stand for MultiPacket Accelerator, which, according to Accton, increases throughput substantially. But if you are already sending back-to-back packets, how can you get any faster...
Status -- Supported
This is another implementation of the DEC 21040 PCI chip.
See DEC 21040 for more information on these cards, and the present driver situation.
Status -- Semi-Supported
David Hinds has been working on a driver for this card, and you are best to check the latest release of his PCMCIA package to see what the present status is.
Status --Supported
These are a series of low-cost ethercards using the 79C960 version of the AMD LANCE. These are bus-master cards, and hence one of the faster ISA bus ethercards available.
DMA selection and chip numbering information can be found in AMD LANCE .
More technical information on AMD LANCE based Ethernet cards can be found in Notes on AMD... .
Status -- Supported
The Allied Telesis AT1700 series ethercards are based on the Fujitsu MB86965. This chip uses a programmed I/O interface, and a pair of fixed-size transmit buffers. This allows small groups of packets to be sent back-to-back, with a short pause while switching buffers.
A unique feature is the ability to drive 150ohm STP (Shielded Twisted Pair) cable commonly installed for Token Ring, in addition to 10baseT 100ohm UTP (unshielded twisted pair).
The Fujitsu chip used on the AT1700 has a design flaw: it can only be fully reset by doing a power cycle of the machine. Pressing the reset button doesn't reset the bus interface. This wouldn't be so bad, except that it can only be reliably detected when it has been freshly reset. The solution/work-around is to power-cycle the machine if the kernel has a problem detecting the AT1700.
Some production runs of the AT1700 had another problem: they are permanently wired to DMA channel 5. This is undocumented, there are no jumpers to disable the "feature", and no driver dares use the DMA capability because of compatibility problems. No device driver will be written using DMA if installing a second card into the machine breaks both, and the only way to disable the DMA is with a knife.
The at1700 driver is included in the standard kernel source tree.
Status -- Supported
This is the PCI version of the AT1500, and it doesn't suffer from the problems that the Boca 79c970 PCI card does.
DMA selection and chip numbering information can be found in AMD LANCE .
More technical information on AMD LANCE based Ethernet cards can be found in Notes on AMD... .
Status -- Supported
There really is no AMD ethernet card. You are probably reading this because the only markings you could find on your card said AMD and the above number. The 7990 is the original `LANCE' chip, but most stuff (including this document) refer to all these similar chips as `LANCE' chips. (...incorrectly, I might add.)
These above numbers refer to chips from AMD that are the heart of many ethernet cards. For example, the Allied Telesis AT1500 (see AT1500 ) the NE1500/2100 (see NE1500 ) and the Boca-VLB/PCI cards (see Boca-VLB/PCI )
The 79C960 (a.k.a. PCnet-ISA) contains enhancements and bug fixes over the original 7990 LANCE design.
Chances are that the existing LANCE driver will work with all AMD LANCE based cards. (except perhaps the NI65XX - see NI65XX for more info on that one.) This driver should also work with NE1500 and NE2100 clones.
For the ISA bus master mode all structures used directly by the LANCE, the initialization block, Rx and Tx rings, and data buffers, must be accessible from the ISA bus, i.e. in the lower 16M of real memory. If more than 16MB of memory is installed, low-memory `bounce-buffers' are used when needed.
The DMA channel can be set with the low bits of the otherwise-unused dev->mem_start value (a.k.a. PARAM_1). (see PARAM_1 ) If unset it is probed for by enabling each free DMA channel in turn and checking if initialization succeeds.
The HP-J2405A board is an exception: with this board it's easy to read the EEPROM-set values for the IRQ, and DMA.
See Notes on AMD... for more info on these chips.
Status -- Supported
This is the PCnet-ISA+ -- an enhanced version of the 79C960. It has support for jumper-less configuration and Plug and Play. See the info in the above section.
Status -- Supported
This is the PCnet-32 -- a 32 bit bus-master version of the original LANCE chip for VL-bus and local bus systems. Minor cleanups were added to the original lance driver around v1.1.50 to support these 32 bit versions of the LANCE chip. The main problem was that the current versions of the '965 and '970 chips have a minor bug. They clear the Rx buffer length field in the Rx ring when they are explicitly documented not to. Again, see the above info.
Status -- Supported
This is the PCnet-PCI -- similar to the PCnet-32, but designed for PCI bus based systems. Again, see the above info. Donald has modified the LANCE driver to use the PCI BIOS structure that was introduced by Drew Eckhardt for the PCI-NCR SCSI driver. This means that you need to build a kernel with PCI BIOS support enabled.
Note that the Boca implementation of the 79C970 fails on fast Pentium machines. This is a hardware problem, as it affects DOS users as well. See the Boca section for more details.
Status -- Supported
This is the PCnet-SCSI -- which is basically treated like a '970 from an Ethernet point of view. A minor '974 specific fix was added to the 1.1.8x kernels, so get a 1.1.90 or newer kernel. Also see the above info. Don't ask if the SCSI half of the chip is supported -- this is the Ethernet-Howto, not the SCSI-Howto.
Status -- Semi-Supported
This driver is included in the present kernel as an alpha test driver. Please see Alpha Drivers in this document for important information regarding alpha drivers. If you use it, let Donald know how things work out, as not too many people have this card and feedback has been low.
Status -- Supported
This on board ethernet uses an i82596 bus-master chip.
It can only be at i/o address 0x300. The author of this
driver is Mark Evans. By looking at the driver source,
it appears that the IRQ is hardwired to 10.
Earlier versions of the driver had a tendency to think
that anything living at 0x300 was an apricot NIC.
Since then the hardware address is checked to avoid these
false detections.
Status -- Semi-Supported
With the very low cost and better performance of ethernet, chances are that most places will be giving away their Arcnet hardware for free, resulting in a lot of home systems with Arcnet.
An advantage of Arcnet is that all of the cards have identical interfaces, so one driver will work for everyone.
Recent interest in getting Arcnet going has picked up again and Avery Pennarun's alpha driver has been put into the default kernel sources for 1.1.80 and above. The arcnet driver uses `arc0' as its name instead of the usual `eth0' for ethernet devices. Bug reports and success stories can be mailed to:
apenwarr@tourism.807-city.on.ca
There are information files contained in the standard kernel for setting jumpers and general hints.
Note that AT&T's StarLAN is an orphaned technology, like SynOptics LattisNet, and can't be used in a standard 10Base-T environment.
Status -- Not Supported
These StarLAN cards use an interface similar to the i82586
chip. At one point, Matthijs Melchior
(matthijs.n.melchior@att.com) was playing with the 3c507
driver, and almost had something useable working. Haven't
heard much since that.
Status -- Supported
This is a generic, low-cost OEM pocket adaptor being sold by AT-Lan-Tec, and (likely) a number of other suppliers. A driver for it is included in the standard kernel. Note that there is substantial information contained in the driver source file `atp.c'. BTW, the adaptor (AEP-100L) has both 10baseT and BNC connections! You can reach AT-Lan-Tec at 1-301-948-7070. Ask for the model that works with Linux, or ask for tech support.
In the Netherlands a compatible adaptor is sold under the name SHI-TEC PE-NET/CT, and sells for about $125. The vendor was Megasellers. They state that they do not sell to private persons, but this doesn't appear to be strictly adhered to. They are: Megasellers, Vianen, The Netherlands. They always advertise in Dutch computer magazines. Note that the newer model EPP-NET/CT appears to be significantly different than the PE-NET/CT, and will not work with the present driver. Hopefully someone will come up with the programming information and this will be fixed up.
In Germany, a similar adaptor comes as a no-brand-name product. Prolan 890b, no brand on the casing, only a roman II. Resellers can get a price of about $130, including a small wall transformer for the power.
The adaptor is `normal size' for the product class, about 57mm wide, 22mm high tapering to 15mm high at the DB25 connector, and 105mm long (120mm including the BNC socket). It's switchable between the RJ45 and BNC jacks with a small slide switch positioned between the two: a very intuitive design.
Donald performed some power draw measurements, and determined that the average current draw was only about 100mA @ 5V. This power draw is low enough that you could buy or build a cable to take the 5V directly from the keyboard/mouse port available on many laptops. (Bonus points here for using a standardized power connector instead of a proprietary one.)
Note that the device name that you pass to ifconfig
is not eth0 but atp0 for this device.
Yes, they make more than just multi-port serial cards. :-)
Status -- Supported
These cards are based on AMD's PCnet chips, used in the AT1500 and the like. You can pick up a combo (10BaseT and 10Base2) PCI card for under $70 at the moment.
Boca PCI cards have trouble with Pentium systems that are operating faster than 66MHz. Note that this is not a driver problem, as it hits DOS/Win/NT users as well. Donald had this to add:
``Boca's technical support number is 407 241-8088. When I called they claimed that they couldn't reveal what the hardware problem was, but that the fix was available from them. That's not really a rational response, but people with Boca PCI ethercards should try it. BTW, tell them you are using the card with Linux, and that it works fine with 486 and P5-60Mhz systems.''
Donald also did a comparitive test with the above Boca PCI card and a similar Allied Telsyn PCnet/PCI implementation, which showed that the problem lies in Boca's implementation of the PCnet/PCI chip. These test results can be accessed on Don's www server.
Latest rumour is that they solder on a capacitor that they left out in their initial design to fix the problem.
More general information can be found in AMD LANCE .
More technical information on AMD LANCE based Ethernet cards can be found in Notes on AMD... .
Donald writes: `Yes, another one of these companies that won't release its programming information. They waited for months before actually confirming that all their information was proprietary, deliberately wasting my time. Avoid their cards like the plague if you can. Also note that some people have phoned Cabletron, and have been told things like `a D. Becker is working on a driver for linux' -- making it sound like I work for them. This is NOT the case.'
If you feel like asking them why they don't want to release their low level programming info so that people can use their cards, write to support@ctron.com. Tell them that you are using Linux, and are disappointed that they don't support open systems. And no, the usual driver development kit they supply is useless. It is just a DOS object file that you are supposed to link against. Which you aren't allowed to even reverse engineer.
Status -- Semi-Supported
These are NEx000 almost-clones that are reported to work with the standard NEx000 drivers, thanks to a ctron-specific check during the probe. If there are any problems, they are unlikely to be fixed, as the programming information is unavailable.
Status -- Semi-Supported
Again, there is not much one can do when the programming information is proprietary. The E2100 is a poor design. Whenever it maps its shared memory in during a packet transfer, it maps it into the whole 128K region! That means you can't safely use another interrupt-driven shared memory device in that region, including another E2100. It will work most of the time, but every once in a while it will bite you. (Yes, this problem can be avoided by turning off interrupts while transferring packets, but that will almost certainly lose clock ticks.) Also, if you mis-program the board, or halt the machine at just the wrong moment, even the reset button won't bring it back. You will have to turn it off and leave it off for about 30 seconds.
Media selection is automatic, but you can override this with the low bits of the dev->mem_end parameter. See PARAM_2
Also, don't confuse the E2100 for a NE2100 clone. The E2100 is a shared memory NatSemi DP8390 design, roughly similar to a brain-damaged WD8013, whereas the NE2100 (and NE1500) use a bus-mastering AMD LANCE design.
There is an E2100 driver included in the standard kernel. However, seeing as programming info isn't available, don't expect bug-fixes. Don't use one unless you are already stuck with the card.
Some people have had difficulty in finding vendors that carry D-link stuff. This should help.
(714) 455-1688 in the US
(081) 203-9900 in the UK
(416) 828-0260 in Canada
(02) 916-1600 in Taiwan
Status -- Supported
The manual says that it is 100 % compatible with the NE2000. This is not true. You should call them and tell them you are using their card with Linux, and they should correct their documentation. Some pre-0.99pl12 driver versions may have trouble recognizing the DE2** series as 16 bit cards, and these cards are the most widely reported as having the spurious transfer address mismatch errors. Note that there are cards from Digital (DEC) that are also named DE100 and DE200, but the similarity stops there.
Status -- Supported
This is a PCI card using the PCI version of AMD's LANCE chip. DMA selection and chip numbering information can be found in AMD LANCE .
More technical information on AMD LANCE based Ethernet cards can be found in Notes on AMD... .
Status -- Supported
This is a generic DEC 21040 PCI chip implementation, and works with the generic 21040 driver.
See DEC 21040 for more information on these cards, and the present driver situation.
Status -- Supported
Laptop users and other folk who might want a quick
way to put their computer onto the ethernet may want
to use this. The driver is included with the default
kernel source tree.
Bjorn Ekwall bj0rn@blox.se wrote the driver.
Expect about 180kb/s transfer speed from this via the
parallel port. You should read the README.DLINK
file in the kernel source tree.
Note that the device name that you pass to ifconfig
is now eth0 and not the previously
used dl0.
If your parallel port is not at the standard 0x378
then you will have to recompile. Bjorn writes:
``Since the DE-620 driver tries to sqeeze the last microsecond
from the loops, I made the irq and port address constants instead
of variables. This makes for a usable speed, but it also means
that you can't change these assignements from e.g. lilo;
you _have_ to recompile...'' Also note that some laptops
implement the on-board parallel port at 0x3bc which
is where the parallel ports on monochrome cards were/are.
Status -- Supported
Same as the DE-600, only with two output formats. Bjorn has written a driver for this model, for kernel versions 1.1 and above. See the above information on the DE-600.
Status -- Semi-Supported
Some people have been using this PCMCIA card for some time now with their notebooks. It is a basic 8390 design, much like a NE2000. The LinkSys PCMCIA card and the IC-Card Ethernet (available from Midwest Micro) are supposedly DE-650 clones as well. Note that at present, this driver is not part of the standard kernel, and so you will have to do some patching.
See PCMCIA Support in this document, and if you can, have a look at:
Status -- Supported
These cards are now detected (as of 0.99pl15) thanks to
Eberhard Moenkeberg emoenke@gwdg.de who noted that
they use `DFI' in the first 3 bytes of the prom, instead
of using 0x57 in bytes 14 and 15, which is what all the
NE1000 and NE2000 cards use. (The 300 is an 8 bit
pseudo NE1000 clone, and the 400 is a pseudo NE2000 clone.)
Status -- Supported
As of linux v1.0, there is a driver included as standard
for these cards. It was written by David C. Davies.
There is documentation included in the source file
`depca.c', which includes info on how to use more than
one of these cards in a machine. Note that the DE422 is
an EISA card. These cards are all based on the AMD LANCE chip.
See
AMD LANCE
for more info.
A maximum of two of the ISA cards can be used, because they
can only be set for 0x300 and 0x200 base I/O address.
If you are intending to do this, please read the notes in
the driver source file depca.c in the standard kernel
source tree.
Status -- Supported
Included into kernels v1.1.62 and above is this driver,
also by David C. Davies of DEC. These cards use a proprietary
chip from DEC, as opposed to the LANCE chip used in the
earlier cards like the DE200. These cards support both shared
memory or programmed I/O, although you take about a 50%performance hit if you use PIO mode. The shared memory size can
be set to 2kB, 32kB or 64kB, but only 2 and 32 have been tested
with this driver. David says that the performance is virtually
identical between the 2kB and 32kB mode. There is more information
(including using the driver as a loadable module) at the top
of the driver file ewrk3.c and also in README.ewrk3.
Both of these files come with the standard kernel distribution.
Other interesting notes are that it appears that David is/was working on this driver for the unreleased version of Linux for the DEC Alpha AXP. And the standard driver has a number of interesting ioctl() calls that can be used to get or clear packet statistics, read/write the EEPROM, change the hardware address, and the like. Hackers can see the source code for more info on that one.
David has also written a configuration utility for this
card (along the lines of the DOS program NICSETUP.EXE)
along with other tools. These can be found on
sunsite.unc.edu in the directory
/pub/Linux/system/Network/management -- look for the
file ewrk3tools-X.XX.tar.gz.
Status -- Supported
These cards are based on the 21040 chip mentioned below. Included into kernels v1.1.86 and above is this driver, also by David C. Davies of DEC. It sure is nice to have support from someone on the inside ;-) Have a read of the 21040 section for extra info.
Note that as of 1.1.91, David has added a compile time option that
may allow non-DEC cards (such as the Znyx cards) to work with
this driver. Have a look at README.de4x5 for details.
Status -- Supported
The DEC 21040 is a bus-mastering single chip ethernet solution from Digital, similar to AMD's PCnet chip. The 21040 is specifically designed for the PCI bus architecture. SMC's new EtherPower PCI card uses this chip. The new 21140 recently announced is for supporting 100Base-? and is supposed to be able to work with drivers for the 21040 chip.
You have a choice of two drivers for cards based on this chip. There is the DE425 driver discussed above, and the generic 21040 driver that Donald has written.
To use David's de4x5 driver with non-DEC cards, have a
look at README.de4x5 for details.
Donald is doing his generic 21040 driver development on a
SMC EtherPower PCI card at the moment, and this driver
is included in the standard kernel source as of 1.1.84.
Note that this driver is still considered an alpha
driver (see
Alpha Drivers
) at the
moment, and should be treated as such. To use it, you
will have to edit arch/i386/config.in and
uncomment the line for CONFIG_DEC_ELCP support.
Also note to change the output media from the default of 10BaseT to use 10Base2, you will have to change the `4' to a `d' at (or around line 325 in tulip.c) where it has:
outl(0x00000004, ioaddr + CSR13);
This will probably be made more elegant as the driver moves out of alpha testing.
Farallon sells EtherWave adaptors and transceivers. This device allows multiple 10baseT devices to be daisy-chained.
Status -- Supported
This is reported to be a 3c509 clone that includes the EtherWave transceiver. People have used these successfully with Linux and the present 3c509 driver. They are too expensive for general use, but are a great option for special cases. Hublet prices start at $125, and Etherwave adds $75-$100 to the price of the board -- worth it if you have pulled one wire too few, but not if you are two network drops short.
The 272** cards use programmed I/O, similar to the NE*000 boards, but the data transfer port can be `turned off' when you aren't accessing it, avoiding problems with autoprobing drivers.
Thanks to Glenn Talbott for helping clean up the confusion in this section regarding the version numbers of the HP hardware.
Status -- Supported
8 Bit 8390 based 10BaseT, not recommended for all the 8 bit reasons. It was re-designed a couple years ago to be highly integrated which caused some changes in initialization timing which only affected testing programs, not LAN drivers. (The new card is not `ready' as soon after switching into and out of loopback mode.)
Status -- Supported
The HP PC Lan+ is different to the standard HP PC Lan card. This driver was added to the list of drivers in the standard kernel at about v1.1.3X. Note that even though the driver is included, the entry in `config.in' seems to have been omitted. If you want to use it, and it doesn't come up in `config.in' then add the following line to `config.in' under the `HP PCLAN support' line:
bool 'HP PCLAN Plus support' CONFIG_HPLAN_PLUS n
Then run make config;make dep;make zlilo or whatever.
The 47B is a 16 Bit 8390 based 10BaseT w/AUI, and the 52A is a 16 Bit 8390 based ThinLAN w/AUI. These cards are high performers (3c509 speed) without the interrupt latency problems (32K onboard RAM for TX or RX packet buffering). They both offer LAN connector autosense, data I/O in I/O space (simpler) or memory mapped (faster), and soft configuration.
The 47A is the older model that existed before the `B'. Two versions 27247-60001 or 27247-60002 have part numbers marked on the card. Functionally the same to the LAN driver, except bits in ROM to identify boards differ. -60002 has a jumper to allow operation in non-standard ISA busses (chipsets that expect IOCHRDY early.)
Status -- Supported
These are lower priced, and slightly faster than the 27247B/27252A, but are missing some features, such as AUI, ThinLAN connectivity, and boot PROM socket. This is a fairly generic LANCE design, but a minor design decision makes it incompatible with a generic `NE2100' driver. Special support for it (including reading the DMA channel from the board) is included thanks to information provided by HP's Glenn Talbott.
More technical information on LANCE based cards can be found in Notes on AMD...
Status -- Supported
The HP-Vectra has an AMD PCnet chip on the motherboard. Earlier kernel versions would detect it as the HP-J2405A but that would fail, as the Vectra doesn't report the IRQ and DMA channel like the J2405A. Get a kernel newer than v1.1.53 to avoid this problem.
DMA selection and chip numbering information can be found in AMD LANCE .
More technical information on LANCE based cards can be found in Notes on AMD...
Status -- Supported
This is compatible with the Intel based Zenith Z-note. See Z-note for more info.
Supposedly this site has a comprehensive database of useful stuff for newer versions of the Thinkpad. I haven't checked it out myself yet.
For those without a WWW browser handy, try
peipa.essex.ac.uk:/pub/tp750/
Status -- Semi-Supported
People have been using this PCMCIA card with Linux as well. Similar points apply, those being that you need a supported PCMCIA chipset on your notebook, and that you will have to patch the PCMCIA support into the standard kernel.
See PCMCIA Support in this document, and if you can, have a look at:
Status -- Semi-Supported
This card uses the intel i82586. (Surprise, huh?) The driver is in the standard release of the kernel, as an alpha driver. See Alpha Drivers for important information on using alpha-test ethernet drivers with Linux.
The reason is that the driver works well with slow machines, but the i82586 occasionally hangs from the packet buffer contention that a fast machine can cause. One reported hack/fix is to change all of the outw() calls to outw_p(). Also, the driver is missing promiscuous and multicast modes. (See Multicast and... )
There is also the standard way of using the chip (read slower) that is described in the chip manual, and used in other i82586 drivers, but this would require a re-write of the entire driver.
There is some technical information available on the i82586 in Programming the Intel Chips and also in the source code for the driver `eexpress.c'. Don't be afraid to read it. ;-)
Status -- Semi-Supported
Bao Chau Ha has written a driver for these cards that is scheduled
to go into the 1.3.x kernels. It may also work with some of
the Compaq built-in ethernet systems that are based on the
i82595 chip. If you want to try the driver out now, you can
e-mail Bao on bao@saigon.async.com and ask for it.
Status -- Not Supported
These PCI and EISA cards use a different chip that the PRO/10 cards do. Bao is currently trying to get a datasheet out of Intel without having to sign a NDA. Good Luck!
Status -- Supported
This is supposed to be a re-badged DE-650. See the information on the DE-650 in DE-650 .
Status -- Semi-Supported
Another i82586 based card. Dirk Niggemann
dabn100@hermes.cam.ac.uk
has written a driver that he classes as ``pre-alpha''
that he would like people to test. Mail him for more details.
Mylex can be reached at the following numbers, in case anyone wants to ask them anything.
MYLEX CORPORATION, Fremont
Sales: 800-77-MYLEX, (510) 796-6100
FAX: (510) 745-8016.
Status -- Supported
This is a PCI card that is based on DEC's 21040 chip. It is selectable between 10BaseT, 10Base2 and 10Base5 output. The LNP101 card has been verified to work with the generic 21040 driver.
See the section on the 21040 chip ( DEC 21040 ) for more information.
Status -- Not Supported
The LNP104 uses the DEC 21050 chip to deliver four independent 10BaseT ports. It may work with 21040 drivers, but nobody has tried yet.
Status -- Not Supported
Russ writes that "...it's a fairly vanilla 8390-based adapter. Only really tricky thing is that, like the Interlan es3210, you MUST do only 32-bit transfers to/from the board. Look at the Crynwr packet driver and try making the changes yourself...''
The prefix `NE' came from Novell Ethernet. Novell followed the cheapest NatSemi databook design and sold the manufacturing rights (spun off?) Eagle, just to get reasonably-priced ethercards into the market. (The now ubiquitous NE2000 card.)
Status -- Supported
The now-generic name for a bare-bones design around
the NatSemi 8390. They use programmed I/O rather than
shared memory, leading to easier installation but
slightly lower performance and a few problems. Again,
the savings of using an 8 bit NE1000 over the NE2000
are only warranted if you expect light use. Some
recently introduced NE2000 clones use the National
Semiconductor `AT/LANTic' 83905 chip, which offers
a shared memory mode similar to the 8013 and EEPROM
or software configuration. Some problems can arise
with poor NE2000 clones. See
Problems with...
, and
Poor NE2000 Clones
In general it is not a good idea to put a NE2000
clone at I/O address 0x300 because nearly
every device driver probes there at boot. Some
poor NE2000 clones don't take kindy to being prodded
in the wrong areas, and will respond by locking your
machine.
Donald has written a NE2000 diagnostic program, but it is still presently in alpha test. (ne2k) See Diagnostic Programs for more information.
Status -- Supported
These cards use the original 7990 LANCE chip from AMD and are supported using the Linux lance driver. Newer NE2100 clones use the updated PCnet/ISA chip from AMD.
Some earlier versions of the lance driver had problems with getting the IRQ line via autoIRQ from the original Novell/Eagle 7990 cards. Hopefully this is now fixed. If not, then specify the IRQ via LILO, and let us know that it still has problems.
DMA selection and chip numbering information can be found in AMD LANCE .
More technical information on LANCE based cards can be found in Notes on AMD...
Status -- Not Supported
This card uses a lowly 8MHz 80186, and hence you are better off using a cheap NE2000 clone. Even if a driver was available, the NE2000 card would most likely be faster.
Status -- Supported
The PureData PDUC8028 and PDI8023 series of cards are reported
to work, thanks to special probe code contributed by Mike
Jagdis jaggy@purplet.demon.co.uk. The support is integrated
with the WD driver.
Status -- Semi-Supported
Michael Hipp has written a driver for this card. It is included in the standard kernel as an `alpha' driver. Michael would like to hear feedback from users that have this card. See Alpha Drivers for important information on using alpha-test ethernet drivers with Linux.
Michael says that ``the internal sysbus seems to be slow. So we often lose packets because of overruns while receiving from a fast remote host.''
This card also uses one of the Intel chips. See Programming the Intel Chips for more technical information.
Status -- Semi-Supported
There is also a driver for the LANCE based NI6510, and it is also written by Michael Hipp. Again, it is also an `alpha' driver. For some reason, this card is not compatible with the generic LANCE driver. See Alpha Drivers for important information on using alpha-test ethernet drivers with Linux.
Status -- Semi-Supported
This is just a 3c501 clone, with a different S.A. PROM prefix. I assume it is equally as brain dead as the original 3c501 as well. Kernels 1.1.53 and up check for the NP943 i.d. and then just treat it as a 3c501 after that. See 3Com 3c501 for all the reasons as to why you really don't want to use one of these cards.
Status -- Supported
This driver was included into the v1.1 kernels, and it was written by PJD Weichmann and SWS Bern. It appears that the SK G16 is similar to the NI6510, in that it is based on the first edition LANCE chip (the 7990). Once again, I have no idea as to why this card won't work with the generic LANCE driver.
The ethernet part of Western Digital has been bought by SMC. One common mistake people make is that the relatively new SMC Elite Ultra is the same as the older SMC Elite16 models -- this is not the case.
Here is how to contact SMC (not that you should need to.)
SMC / Standard Microsystems Corp., 80 Arkay Drive, Hauppage, New York, 11788, USA.
Technical Support via phone:
800-992-4762 (USA)
800-433-5345 (Canada)
516-435-6250 (Other Countries)
Literature requests:
800-SMC-4-YOU (USA)
800-833-4-SMC (Canada)
516-435-6255 (Other Countries)
Technical Support via E-mail:
techsupt@ccmail.west.smc.com
FTP Site:
ftp.smc.com
Status -- Supported
These are the 8-bit versions of the card. The
8 bit 8003 is slightly less expensive, but only
worth the savings for light use. Note that some
of the non-EEPROM cards (clones with jumpers, or
old old old wd8003 cards) have no way of reporting
the IRQ line used. In this case, auto-irq is used, and if
that fails, the driver silently assings IRQ 5.
Information regarding what the jumpers on old non-EEPROM
wd8003 cards do can be found in conjunction with the
SMC setup/driver disks stored on
dorm.rutgers.edu in the directory
/pub/novell/nic_drvs/. Note that some of the
newer SMC `SuperDisk' programs will fail to detect
the old EEPROM-less cards. The file SMCDSK46.EXE
seems to be a good all-round choice. Also the jumper
settings for old cards are in an ascii text file in the
aforementioned archive. The latest (greatest?) version
can be obtained from ftp.smc.com.
As these are basically the same as their 16 bit counterparts (WD8013 / SMC Elite16), you should see the next section for more information.
Status -- Supported
Over the years the design has added more registers and an EEPROM. Clones usually go by the `8013' name, and usually use a non-EEPROM (jumpered) design. This part of WD has been sold to SMC, so you'll usually see something like SMC/WD8013 or SMC Elite16 Plus (WD8013). Late model SMC cards will have two main PLCC chips on board; the SMC 83c690 and the SMC 83c694. The shared memory design makes the cards 10-20 % faster, especially with larger packets. More importantly, from the driver's point of view, it avoids a few bugs in the programmed-I/O mode of the 8390, allows safe multi-threaded access to the packet buffer, and it doesn't have a programmed-I/O data register that hangs your machine during warm-boot probes.
Non-EEPROM cards that can't just read the selected IRQ will attempt auto-irq, and if that fails, they will silently assign IRQ 10. (8 bit versions will assign IRQ 5)
Also see 8013 clones and 8013 problems .
Status -- Supported
This ethercard is based on a new chip from SMC, with a few new features. While it has a mode that is similar to the older SMC ethercards, it's not compatible with the old WD80*3 drivers. However, in this mode it shares most of its code with the other 8390 drivers, while operating somewhat faster than a WD8013 clone.
Since part of the Ultra looks like an 8013, the Ultra probe is supposed to find an Ultra before the wd8013 probe has a chance to mistakenly identify it.
Std. as of 0.99pl14, and made possible by documentation and ethercard loan from Duke Kamstra. If you plan on using an Ultra with Linux send him a note of thanks to let him know that there are Linux users out there!
Donald mentioned that it is possible to write a separate driver for the Ultra's `Altego' mode which allows chaining transmits at the cost of inefficient use of receive buffers, but that will probably not happen.
Bus-Master SCSI host adaptor users take note: In the manual that ships with Interactive UNIX, it mentions that a bug in the SMC Ultra will cause data corruption with SCSI disks being run from an aha-154X host adaptor. This will probably bite aha-154X compatible cards, such as the BusLogic boards, and the AMI-FastDisk SCSI host adaptors as well.
SMC has acknowledged the problem occurs with
Interactive, and older Windows NT drivers. It is
a hardware conflict with early revisions of the card
that can be worked around in the driver design. The current
Ultra driver protects against this by only enabling the
shared memory during data transfers with the card. Make sure
your kernel version is at least 1.1.84, or that the driver
version reported at boot is at least smc-ultra.c:v1.12
otherwise you are vulnerable.
Status -- Supported
This card uses SMC's 83c795 chip and supports the Plug 'n Play specification. It also has an SMC Ultra compatible mode, which allows it to be used with the Linux Ultra driver. In this compatibility mode, it uses shared memory instead of programmed i/o. Be sure to set your card for this compatibility mode.
Note that the EtherEZ specific checks were added to the SMC Ultra driver in 1.1.84, and hence earlier kernel versions will not handle these cards correctly.
Status -- Supported
These cards appear to be a basic DEC 21040 implementation, i.e. one big chip and a couple of transceivers. Donald has used one of these cards for his development of the generic 21040 driver. Thanks to Duke Kamstra, once again, for supplying a card to do development on. See DEC 21040 for more details on using one of these cards, and the current status of the driver.
Status -- Not Supported
These 8 bit cards are based on the Fujitsu MB86950, which is an ancient version of the MB86965 used in the Linux at1700 driver. Russ says that you could probably hack up a driver by looking at the at1700.c code and his DOS packet driver for the Tiara card (tiara.asm)
Status -- Not Supported
These are 16bit i/o mapped 8390 cards, much similar to a generic NE2000 card. If you can get the specifications from SMC, then porting the NE2000 driver would probably be quite easy.
Status -- Not Supported
These cards are VLB cards based on the 91c92 chip. They are fairly expensive, and hence the demand for a driver is pretty low at the moment.
Another group that won't release documentation. No cards supported. Don't look for any support in the future unless they release their programming information. And this is highly unlikely, as they forbid you from even reverse- engineering their drivers. If you are already stuck with one, see if you can trade it off on some DOS (l)user.
And if you just want to verify that this is the case, you can reach Xircom at 1-800-874-7875, 1-800-438-4526 or +1-818-878-7600. They used to advertise that their products "work with all network operating systems", but have since stopped. Wonder why...
Status -- Not Supported
Not to get your hopes up, but if you have one of these parallel port adaptors, you may be able to use it in the DOS emulator with the Xircom-supplied DOS drivers. You will have to allow DOSEMU access to your parallel port, and will probably have to play with SIG (DOSEMU's Silly Interrupt Generator). I have no idea if this will work, but if you have any success with it, let me know, and I will include it here.
Status -- Supported
The built-in Z-Note network adaptor is based on the Intel
i82593 using two DMA channels. There is an (alpha?) driver
available in the present kernel version. As with all notebook
and pocket adaptors, it is under the `Pocket and portable
adaptors' section when running make config.
See
Programming the Intel chips
for more technical information.
Also note that the IBM ThinkPad 300 is compatible with the Z-Note.
Status -- Supported
You have a choice of two drivers for cards based on this chip. There is the DE425 driver written by David, and the generic 21040 driver that Donald has written.
Note that as of 1.1.91, David has added a compile time option that
may allow non-DEC cards (such as the Znyx cards) to work with
this driver. Have a look at README.de4x5 for details.
See DEC 21040 for more information on these cards, and the present driver situation.
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