Subject: Re: if_ep semantics change.
To: John F. Woods <jfw@ksr.com>
From: Herb Peyerl <Herb.Peyerl@novatel.ca>
List: current-users
Date: 02/04/1994 09:59:14
: I seem to recall that a long time ago, there was a popular PC ethernet chip*
: which had a habit of, if hammered too soon with a packet after finishing the
: previous one, would forget that it had to byte-switch data (it was bigendian
: internally) and drop silly-looking packets into memory. 19969, byteswapped,
: is 484, a reasonable, if not obviously predictable, packet length; could this
: be what the problem is? Reports of cards working OK before might have just
: been due to such packets being silently discarded. It might be interesting
: to have the driver inspect the contents of these packets more closely to see
: if that is what is going on (i.e. check the ethernet address in the ethernet
: header to see if it, too, is byteswapped).
:
: * and the name "wd8003" rings a bell, albeit faintly.
That sounds extremely like an 8390 boog rather than just a vendor specific sort
of thing. There's a publishing opportunity for anyone willing to do a
short novel on "NS8390 Bugs.
hpeyerl@novatel.ca | NovAtel Commnications Ltd.
hpeyerl@fsa.ca | <nothing I say matters anyway>
<NetBSD: A drinking group with a serious computing problem!>
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