To enable the AUI media, select the 10base5 or aui media type with ifconfig(8)'s media directive. To select the other media UTP (BNC or,) select the 10base2 or bnc media type.
The IRQ was wildcarded in the kernel configuration file. This is not supported.
An IRQ other than the above IRQ values was specified in the kernel configuration file. The EtherLink II hardware only supports the above listed IRQ values.
The memory test was unable to clear shared the interface's shared memory region. This often indicates that the card is configured at a conflicting iomem address.
The DP8390 Ethernet chip used by this board implements a shared-memory ring-buffer to store incoming packets. The 3c503 usually has only 8K bytes of shared memory. This is only enough room for about 4 full-size (1500 byte) packets. This can sometimes be a problem, especially on the original 3c503, because these boards' shared-memory access speed is quite slow; typically only about 1MB/second. The overhead of this slow memory access, and the fact that there is only room for 4 full-sized packets means that the ring-buffer will occasionally overrun.
When an overrun occurs, the board must be reset to avoid a lockup problem in early revision DP8390 Ethernet chips. Resetting the board causes all of the data in the ring-buffer to be lost, requiring the data to be retransmitted/received, congesting the board further. Because of this, maximum throughput on these boards is only about 400-600K bytes per second.
This problem is exacerbated by
NFS
because the 8-bit boards lack sufficient packet buffer memory to
support the default 8K byte packets that
NFS
and other protocols use as their default.
If these cards must be used
with
NFS,
use the
mount_nfs(8)
-r
and
-w
options in
/etc/fstab
to limit NFS's packet size.
4K (4096) byte packets generally work.