3com 3c509 Drivers

Custom SearchBased on kernel version 4.16.1. Page generated on 2018-04-09 11:53 EST. Linux and the 3Com EtherLink III Series Ethercards (driver v1.18c and higher)-This file contains the instructions and caveats for v1.18c and higher versionsof the 3c509 driver. You should not use the driver without reading this file.release 1.028 February 2002Current maintainer (corrections to):David Ruggiero -(0) IntroductionThe following are notes and information on using the 3Com EtherLink III seriesethercards in Linux. These cards are commonly known by the most widely-usedcard's 3Com model number, 3c509. They are all 10mb/s ISA-bus cards and shouldn'tbe (but sometimes are) confused with the similarly-numbered PCI-bus '3c905'(aka 'Vortex' or 'Boomerang') series. Kernel support for the 3c509 family isprovided by the module 3c509.c, which has code to support all of the followingmodels:3c509 (original ISA card)3c509B (later revision of the ISA card; supports full-duplex)3c589 (PCMCIA)3c589B (later revision of the 3c589; supports full-duplex)3c579 (EISA)Large portions of this documentation were heavily borrowed from the guidewritten the original author of the 3c509 driver, Donald Becker.

The mastercopy of that document, which contains notes on older versions of the driver,currently resides on Scyld web server:(1) Special Driver FeaturesOverriding card settingsThe driver allows boot- or load-time overriding of the card's detected IOADDR,IRQ, and transceiver settings, although this capability shouldn't generally beneeded except to enable full-duplex mode (see below). An example of the syntaxfor LILO parameters for doing this:ether=10,0x310,3,0x3c509,eth0This configures the first found 3c509 card for IRQ 10, base I/O 0x310, andtransceiver type 3 (10base2). The flag '0x3c509' must be set to avoid conflictswith other card types when overriding the I/O address. When the driver isloaded as a module, only the IRQ may be overridden.

3com 3c509 Drivers Driver

For example,setting two cards to IRQ10 and IRQ11 is done by using the irq moduleoption:options 3c509 irq=10,11(2) Full-duplex modeThe v1.18c driver added support for the 3c509B's full-duplex capabilities.In order to enable and successfully use full-duplex mode, three conditionsmust be met:(a) You must have a Etherlink III card model whose hardware supports full-duplex operations. Currently, the only members of the 3c509 family that arepositively known to support full-duplex are the 3c509B (ISA bus) and 3c589B(PCMCIA) cards. Cards without the 'B' model designation do.not. supportfull-duplex mode; these include the original 3c509 (no 'B'), the original3c589, the 3c529 (MCA bus), and the 3c579 (EISA bus).(b) You must be using your card's 10baseT transceiver (i.e., the RJ-45connector), not its AUI (thick-net) or 10base2 (thin-net/coax) interfaces.AUI and 10base2 network cabling is physically incapable of full-duplexoperation.(c) Most importantly, your 3c509B must be connected to a link partner that isitself full-duplex capable. This is almost certainly one of two things: a full-duplex-capable Ethernet switch (.not. a hub), or a full-duplex-capable NIC onanother system that's connected directly to the 3c509B via a crossover cable.Full-duplex mode can be enabled using 'ethtool'./////Extremely important caution concerning full-duplex mode/////Understand that the 3c509B's hardware's full-duplex support is much morelimited than that provide by more modern network interface cards. Althoughat the physical layer of the network it fully supports full-duplex operation,the card was designed before the current Ethernet auto-negotiation (N-way)spec was written.

3com 3c509 Driver Windows 7

This means that the 3c509B family.cannot and will notauto-negotiate a full-duplex connection with its link partner under anycircumstances, no matter how it is initialized. If the full-duplex modeof the 3c509B is enabled, its link partner will very likely need to beindependently forced into full-duplex mode as well; otherwise various nastyfailures will occur - at the very least, you'll see massive numbers of packetcollisions.