Supported Products
FriendlyNET 10/100 PC Fast Ethernet Adapter (99-00586)

AsantéFast 10/100 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter (99-00590)

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Asanté currently supports Linux on the following products:

• FriendlyNET 10/100 PC Fast Ethernet Adapter (99-00586)
• AsantéFast 10/100 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter (99-00590)

Additional 10/100 Fast Ethernet adapters may be supported, but they have not been tested by Asanté's Software QA department.

The Asanté FriendlyNET adapters are compatible with the industry-standard Linux "Tulip" driver which is shipping on the most recent versions of the Linux kernel. 

The Tulip driver has been integrated into the Linux kernel source tree since version 1.1.90, but it was commented out until 1.2.13. At the end of December 1999, the latest stable version of the Linux kernel was 2.2.13 and the latest beta version was 2.3.34.

Source code for this Tulip driver is available. It was written to support the Beowulf cluster project at CESDIS.

Additional information about this driver can be found at:

• Linux-Tulip Information (Greg Siekas)
• Linux and the Tulip Driver (Donald Becker)
• Tulip Driver Development

Support is handled via mailing list:

• Email news and general information to linux-tulip@beowulf.gsfc.nasa.gov 
• Email bug reports to linux-tulip-bug@beowulf.gsfc.nasa.gov 
• Tulip Mailing List Archive on Tux
• Tulip-bug Mailing List Archive on Tux
• Mailing List archive
• Tulip-bugs Mailing List archive

Making and Loading the Modules Version

• Verify that the source code for your current kernel version is installed.
• If you don't have a /usr/include/linux/version.h file, then
  cd /usr/src/linux; make include/linux/version.h
• Copy the driver source code to a source directory, e.g. /usr/src/modules/tulip.c
• Compile the file using the compile-command at the bottom of the tulip.c source file.
• As 'root', load the module using "insmod tulip.o". You should first test this by hand in single-user mode. If it works as expected you should add the insmod command to /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 or /etc/rc.d/rc.local.

Possible Problems and Solutions

If you get an "linux/version.h no such file or directory" you either have not installed the kernel source code, or you haven't run

cd /usr/src/linux; make include/linux/version.h

Options

When loaded as a module the following variables may be set:

Valid media types are:

Not all cards can have their media type set with 'options'. Many cards support multiple media types with a single MII transceiver, and must always be set to an MII type (preferably 11, but other values 9-15 advertise only a single capability). 

Note: Only the highlighted values are supported on the Asanté 10/100 adapters.

An example of loading the Tulip module is insmod tulip.o debug=1 options=0,16 This sets the debug message level to minimal messages, sets the first card to the auto-sense the media type, and the second to forced-full-duplex. (Note: card ordering is set by the motherboard's PCI BIOS.)

Diagnostic Program

A diagnostic program is available to help debug media selection and board-setup problems.

Errata

Due to inaccurate documentation, auto-negotiation cannot be enabled on the PNIC chip

Tulip Multicast Support

Most Ethernet chips can match a single unicast address -- their own station address -- and support a statistical (aka hash) filter for initial filtering of unwanted multicast packets. This is typically done by taking the CRC intermediate result just after destination address arrives, and using a few bits as the index into a table of which multicast packets are acceptable. The typical chip has 64 bins and uses six bits of CRC.

The Tulip does much better than this. The typical operating mode is matching the incoming destination address against a list of 16 addresses. After reserving two entries for the broadcast and station address, that means up to 14 multicast addresses may be perfectly filtered. With more than 14 multicast addresses the chip matches against a single unicast address and uses a statistical multicast filter with 512 bins, resulting in much better filtering than the 64 bin chips.

Original Author: Donald Becker, becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov