Lance.xif

From SpareMiNT Wiki

The driver is based on dummyeth from Kay Roemer, the LANCE code is loosely based on the code of the TUW software and the TUM software. Most of the code had to be rewritten for the use with mintnet, so the actual LANCE code is mainly done by myself and is based on the LANCE documentation from AMD.

Note: The Riebel Card and the TUM board don't have their complete HW address in a ROM. I don't know if the developers at TU Vienna or TU Munich got some HW address space from the internic. If anyone has information about that please let me know. In that case I would use officially assigned addresses within the driver.

Kay has implemented a method for setting the hw address of a board "manually". This is neccessary for some boards which don't have their complete hw address in an NV RAM or a ROM. Please take a look at his documentation to get the information how the hw address can be set.

PLEASE NOTE: The hw address cannot be set for all boards!

The LANCE driver is quite stable now but there are still some optimizations to do. The first published version (0.0) is based on the code of the TUW package to which I added LANCE support for PAM's boards. This code was ported to Kay's dummyeth. The actual driver uses only some definitions and some initialization code of the TU Wien package. I have completely rewritten most of the code.

Please note: Some boards have severe design errors. The PAM's Net boards can send only packets with even sizes. The Riebl Card for the MEGA ST allocates its ram where TOS versions >2.00 reside so if you want to use these things together you have to modify your Riebl card by swapping the MEGA BUS address lines 20 and 21. Furthermore the Riebl MEGA ST boards don't work reliable when a accelerator board is installed (like the PAK). Receiving works only reliable when the board's ram is only read bytewide...

DON'T TRY THESE DRIVERS UNLESS YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY SURE WHAT YOU ARE DOING. I'm not responsible for any crashed harddisk or so.

If you want to know which boards are currently supported please take a look into "lance.c".

[edit] SPECIAL OPTIONS

• hwaddr 0x00:0x00:0x36:0x0[24]:0x??:0x??

This is for Riebl cards only! Riebl cards don't have their address in rom/eeprom but only in battery backed static ram. Unfortunately there are cards without a battery. And even when you own a card with backup battery it may happen that it loses its address. The driver will then tell you with a "(no valid hw address!)" in its startup message. If so it refuses to go up until you setup a valid address. Note: The first four octets are fixed values for the specific board so the driver checks these and refuses to accept addresses with an invalid manufacurer number (that's what the four octets are used for in this case). You will find the address of the card on a small label somewhere on it. The first part is always 00:00:36, the next number is 04 for vme boards and 02 for MEGA bus boards. The last two numbers identify the board itself. For safety you may want to create a config file and always do a "ifconfig -f <filename>" first before setting up the ip address.

• braddr 0x??:0x??:0x??:0x??:0x??:0x??

This is a quite useless funtion to setup the hw broadcast address. It's quite useless because the broadcast address is always 0xff:0xff:0xff:0xff:0xff:0xff.

• debug <level>

With this option you can set the debug level for the driver. You normally don't need this. <level> is an integer value.

• log <filename>

with this option you can set a filename where to log. You normally don't need this. <filename> is a string.