Help setting up a network (arcnet) card...

[yamokosk]

Greetings,

I have an arcnet card I need some help setting up. When I pull up the Mandriva Control Center, and examine the installed hardware, there is a "(null)" listing under Ethernetcard for what I assume is my arcnet card. The other entry under Ethernetcard is my correctly recognized NetXtreme card.

So I tried to run the config tool on the unrecognized arcnet card. After I select "Manually load driver"->"com20020-pci" (chipset of my arcnet card), the config tool just loops back to the "Select the network interface to configure" screen.

I am not averse to doing this all on the command line, I just don't know the proper linux commands. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Oh, and I am running the Mandriva 2006.0 distro with a modified kernel (version 2.6.14-7 with the RTAI patch).

[lakerdonald]

Do. as root:

modprobe com20020-pci
ifconfig eth0 up
dhcpcd eth0

If dhcpcd doesn't work, try:

dhclient eth0

[yamokosk]

I assume that you don't mean eth0? I have two network interfaces, an ethernet card which is recognized correctly and an arcnet card which does not seem to be recognized.

So before attempting any commands, here is ifconfig -a:

[root@localhost Desktop]# ifconfig -a
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:14:22:2E:53:F2
          inet addr:192.168.1.12  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::214:22ff:fe2e:53f2/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:46 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:796 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:2 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:6440 (6.2 KiB)  TX bytes:52669 (51.4 KiB)
          Interrupt:16

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:316 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:316 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:19028 (18.5 KiB)  TX bytes:19028 (18.5 KiB)

sit0      Link encap:IPv6-in-IPv4
          NOARP  MTU:1480  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

If I understand modprobe correctly, it will load the module you specify plus all dependent modules. So when I issue the modprobe command for the arcnet module, I just get:

[root@localhost Desktop]# modprobe com20020-pci -v
insmod /lib/modules/2.6.14.7-rt/kernel/drivers/net/arcnet/com20020-pci.ko

modprobe loads the arcnet module but how does this link it with the actual device?

[lakerdonald]

Basically, when you insert a device driver in the form of a kernel module to the kernel, the module_init() function is called, which does some preliminary setup, adds a device entry if necessary, and makes it available to the world. From then on, it is an event driven affair.
In the case of a network driver, it creates a net entry for each piece of hardware matching that driver. So, for example, when I modprobe eepro100, the driver (eepro100.ko) is inserted to the kernel, and then it makes sure my ethernet card is present. If it is, it creates eth0.
If you want to see what I mean, after modprobing, look at what

ifconfig -a

says.

[yamokosk]

Thanks for the insight lakerdonald. So it seems that when the module is loaded, it is not finding any devices to match the module.

When I issue the modprobe command and then check dmesg, I get:

arcnet: v3.93 BETA 2000/04/29 - by Avery Pennarun et al.
arcnet: COM20020 chipset support (by David Woodhouse et al.)
arcnet: COM20020 PCI support
arcnet: raw mode (`r') encapsulation support loaded.

But I should be getting something like:

arcnet: v3.93 BETA 2000/04/29 - by Avery Pennarun et al.
arcnet: COM20020 chipset support (by David Woodhouse et al.)
arcnet: COM20020 PCI support
PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 0000:02:0c.0
 arc%d: Contemporary Controls
 arc%d: PCI COM20020: station 55h found at A800h, IRQ 10.
 arc%d: Using backplane mode.
 arc%d: Using CKP 64 - data rate 10 Mb/s.
arcnet: raw mode (`r') encapsulation support loaded.

The above is someone's dmesg output for the same card I have. Unfortunately I have tried to contact them but not heard anything back as of yet. So I decided to dig a little deeper and see if the system actually had anything on this card. This is what I have been able to dig up on it:

[root@localhost Desktop]# lspci | grep Contemporary
04:02.0 Network controller: Contemporary Controls: Unknown device a00e (rev 01)
[root@localhost Desktop]# cat /proc/pci
...
  Bus  4, device   2, function  0:
    Class 0280: PCI device 1571:a00e (rev 1).
      IRQ 3.
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xfe5fff80 [0xfe5fffff].
      I/O at 0xcc80 [0xccff].
      I/O at 0xcc70 [0xcc7f].
[root@localhost proc]# cat /proc/ioports
...
c000-cfff : PCI Bus #04
  cc70-cc7f : 0000:04:02.0
  cc80-ccff : 0000:04:02.0

There is no entry in /proc/interrupts for the card because I think it needs to be recognized by the module first?

Any ideas?

[lakerdonald]

Is there any firmware you need to load first?

[yamokosk]

I am unaware of any special firmware for this card. I went digging through the linux documentation (/linux-2.6.14.7/Documentation/networking) and found an arcnet.txt and arcnet-hardware.txt. The arcnet-hardware.txt references cards and manufacturers I have never heard of and seems to only talk about old hardware. The other document, arcnet.txt, is a little more helpful. I tried adding the following to my modprobe.conf:

options com20020 io=0xcc70 irq=11 node=0x00
options com20020-pci backplane=1 clockm=1

The first line I got from arcnet.txt and the second was from a guys website who talked about setting up the Contemporary Controls card in linux (same card I have) (http://martin.wojtczyk.de/index.php?title=Leonardo2). But I got the following errors from dmesg,

arcnet: v3.93 BETA 2000/04/29 - by Avery Pennarun et al.
com20020: Unknown parameter `io'
com20020: Unknown parameter `io'
com20020_pci: Unknown symbol com20020_check
com20020_pci: Unknown symbol com20020_found
arcnet: raw mode (`r') encapsulation support loaded.

Maybe the linux documentation is wrong?

I have a related question. If I ever get this working properly, what do I have to do in order for this device to be loaded on bootup? I don't want to have to always open a terminal window and type modprobe everytime I reboot the machine.

J.D.