Voice Card and Ethernet board

[Thad P Floryan]

marsella at athos.rutgers.edu (Stacy Marsella) in
<Nov.5.15.51.57.1990.8498 at athos.rutgers.edu> writes about problems with
3B1 Ethernet and Voice Power.

I've literally only a few minutes on-line right now, so I'll "do" a brief
answer followed by a longer one later this week.

The Ethernet and Voice Power co-exist fine on my systems.

HOWEVER: after several months of dorking-around (re: another expansion card),
I've discovered there IS sensitivity to the ORDER in which the device drivers
are loaded as well as apparent bugs with /etc/lddrv itself.  The "clue" was
in the UNIXPC Device Driver Writer's Guide re: two 128Kbyte sections (for a
max of 0x40000) and the fact /etc/lddrv allowed me to load 0x47000 worth of
device drivers (several of which crapped out by hanging the system upon an
apparent interrupt  until I removed xt (BLIT Terminal support) and some other
stuff which I never used).

Also, if/when you run diags on the Ethernet cards, be forewarned that multiple
repeats of test 5 (I believe, the 16-block burst test or something like that)
reveal a bug in the diags ... ALL Ethernet cards will fail this test even
though they WILL operate correctly and normally in the system.  The only test
that seems reliable is to "ping" your system using a system that has "ping".

And if you use the UA menus to unload and reload device drivers, the ORDER of
loading (as shown in /etc/lddrv/drivers) WILL change, often to the detriment
of your system's operation.  This kinda screws the whole idea of dynamically
loadable device drivers.  :-(

What REALLY puzzles me is the following (via "/etc/lddrv/lddrv -sv"):

	 DEVNAME  ID  BLK CHAR  LINE   SIZE    ADDR     FLAGS
	    wind   0   -1    7   -1  0x9000   0x53000 ALLOC BOUND 
	    lipc   1   -1   -1   -1  0x7000  0x360000 ALLOC BOUND 
	     cmb   2   -1   -1   -1  0x3000   0x5c000 ALLOC BOUND 
	      qt   3   -1   18   -1  0x2000  0x367000 ALLOC BOUND 
	      tp   4   -1   10   -1  0x3000  0x36b000 ALLOC BOUND 
	 starlan   5   -1   11   -1 0x14000  0x3de000 ALLOC BOUND 
	   voice   6   -1   13   -1  0xa000  0x33e000 ALLOC BOUND 
	   ether   7   -1   14   -1 0x13000  0x348000 ALLOC BOUND 

Perhaps "wind" is not counted in the 0x40000 total.  Quien sabe?  In any
event, the above configuration works; almost any other order totally freezes
the system (even the red "heartbeat" LED stops blinking).  And, yes, this
machine has an expansion chassis (which itself is the cause of a few anomalies
on several systems (but not all)).  Weird voodoo and juju here ... maybe we
all gotta dance under the full moon and swing dead chickens over our heads! :-)

Thad Floryan [ thad at cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]