On Wed, 19 Aug 1998, S.J. Borrill wrote:

> It's been reported to me that when an NC tries to boot from a RiscPC
> over NFS, this can be unreliable if a Atomwide Ether3 is used as the
> network card. The symptoms are a string of errors in the console: 'nfsd
> send error 55' and 'dhcp: sendpkt: No buffer space available'. The
> problems go away if an Atomwide EtherB is used. This is odd seeing that 
> the two drivers are virtually identical. I personally can't recreate
> the problem, but then I'm using old Ether3s whereas the installer that
> reported the problem in the first place is using brand new ones. The
> controller chip is different on the new ones; it's now the same part as 
> the EtherB (SEEQ80C04) whereas on all the older cards it is the
> SEEQ8005. There's probably not a lot of difference though.
> 
> The facts seem to suggest to me that the current ea driver has problems
> with mbufs when talking to SEEQ80C04 hardware. systat mbufs doesn't
> suggest anything. If two network cards are required and new Ether3s don't
> cut it, what are the alternatives? I-cubed EtherLan500s are not
> recognised (or rather they give the error not configured).

Hi,
  hmm, The 8004 and 8005 are quite similar chips but there are minor
differences. I have been meaning to combine the support into a single
driver ... I have not come across the ether3 with the 8004 so the ea
driver has never been tested with this chip. I'll take a look a see if
there is anything obvious that is ikely to be the cause of the problem.

CHeers,
				Mark