Socket 10/100 Cf+

[iamasmith]

Since trying the USB 10/100 network adaptor I really, really, wanted a CF based 10/100 adaptor that I could use under OpenBSD.

The list of supported CF 10/100 adaptors on the Zaurus platform is fairly small (2 of them actually and neither is available in the UK). So I decided to purchase the only adaptor that seems to be available in the UK.. the Socket 10/100 CF+ which according to some information on the Socket web site (http://www.socketcom.com/ZaurusSharp.asp) worked with the Zaurus on Sharp ROMs with a slight tweak of /etc/pcmcia/config

Here is the adaptor compared to a cigarette package (regular Marlboro, not 100s) to give you an example of the size of the adaptor.

As you can see it's quite bulky and I really need to find a rugged little box for it since it cost me around £100 GBP and I don't want it busted (no I'm not going to carry it in an old Marlboro packet).

You may notice that the CF part of the card is quite long... my first test was to plug it into my old SL-C860 that is running Cacko at the moment just to see if it was indeed recognised.... here's a picture of the card in the SL-C860...

As you can see the card does protrude a little.... This is possibly deliberate to avoid any issues with mounting in Laptops that have funny shaped sides... ah well..

The card functioned perfectly on Cacko 1.23 (without mods to the pcmcia config file)... here's a screen shot of a Konsole under Cacko showing the remainder of dmesg and an ifconfig of the card.

 [ Invalid Attachment ]

OK, Linux dudes can stop reading here... the rest is about running it on OpenBSD.

firstly the official posting I made..
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-te...39471928926&w=2

The card isn't recognised under OpenBSD at the moment but can be made to be recognised very easily using a couple of simple patches.

Simply inserting the card will result in the Zaurus pretty much saying.... oh, a PCMCIA card... here's what it is... (no driver attachment).

These two diffs apply to sys/dev/pcmcia/pcmciadevs.h and if_ne_pcmcia.c respectively, they define the appropriate product code for the card and the appropriate identification structure for the card (note the use of the non SOCKET Ethernet Vendor code - see the quoted posting for more info).

Patches removed...they have now been committed to -current

Following patch application the card will be recognised correctly... dmesg output looks like this...

ne0 at pcmcia1 function 0 "Socket, CF+ 10/100 Ethernet, 1.0" port 0x0/32, irq 137, address 00:12:0e:xx:xx:xx
acphy0 at ne0 phy 1: AC101 10/100 PHY, rev. 11

ifconfig ne0 looks like...

ne0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        lladdr 00:12:0e:xx:xx:xx
        groups: egress
        media: Ethernet 100baseTX full-duplex
        status: active
        inet6 fe80::212:eff:fexx:xxxx%ne0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5
        inet 10.255.38.2 netmask 0xffff0000 broadcast 10.255.255.255

and ifconfig -m ne0 (showing media options) gives...

ne0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        lladdr 00:12:0e:xx:xx:xx
        groups: egress
        media: Ethernet 100baseTX full-duplex
        status: active
        supported media:
                media none
                media 10baseT
                media 10baseT mediaopt full-duplex
                media 100baseTX
                media 100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex
                media autoselect
        inet6 fe80::212:eff:fexx:xxxx%ne0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5
        inet 10.255.38.2 netmask 0xffff0000 broadcast 10.255.255.255

I have tested (on OpenBSD) all of the media selections and they seem to be reliable for me.

-Andy

[iamasmith]

Wohoo, finally moved the bottleneck to the Zaurus where it deserves to be...

ne0: warning - receiver ring buffer overrun
ne0: warning - receiver ring buffer overrun
ne0: warning - receiver ring buffer overrun
ne0: warning - receiver ring buffer overrun
ne0: warning - receiver ring buffe...

But not an NFS error in sight... this is looking fairly bullet proof to me.

-Andy

[iamasmith]

Wow, I know I got a lot of buffer overruns but I just built the whole of Gutenprint 5 in about 2 hours across an NFS share.

-Andy

[iamasmith]

Note, this was just committed to 3.9 cvs so any snapshots built from today onwards should have this driver rolled in.

-Andy

[iamasmith]

Some updated info on this...

Since tuning my mounts with noatime and softdep I don't have any of those ugly buffer overruns and things are a helluva lot faster - most particularly running stuff like moinmoin where there are a lot of source files being read.

Also I finally got round to running my Zaurus flat from a full charge last night (long overdue for calibration). I had the card inserted with an ssh session running top whilst the unit was off power but with the lid closed though.

It ran for almost exactly 3 hours before suspending... not bad considering the card is running at 100Mbit/s full duplex (3 hours is shown as about average for OpenBSD because the disk is constantly active).

-Andy

[cmonex]

Since trying the USB 10/100 network adaptor I really, really, wanted a CF based 10/100 adaptor that I could use under OpenBSD.

The list of supported CF 10/100 adaptors on the Zaurus platform is fairly small (2 of them actually and neither is available in the UK).

really?

i happen to have a generic cf 10/100 lan card here at home, plug it in the zaurus and it worked instantly. it's a dynalink dyn100 card or whatever  supposed to be ne2000.

is this one of those two cards on that list?

[iamasmith]

Heh, no it isn't on the list and since working on the driver I found that there are quite a number of cards that the driver supports but that aren't listed on the zaurus page of the OpenBSD site.

The socket one does seem to work well now that I added the product details to the driver and it has been added to the cvs now.

-Andy