SiS 900/7016 Fast Ethernet Device Driver by Ollie Lho (ollie@sis.com.tw) November 4, 1999. Document Revision: 0.2 This document gives some information on installation and usage of SiS 900/7016 device driver under Linux. ______________________________________________________________________ Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. License 3. Changes 4. Tested Environment 5. Files in This Package 6. Installation 6.1 Kernel version later than 2.2.11 and 2.3.15 6.1.1 Building the driver as loadable module 6.1.2 Building the driver into kernel 6.2 Earlier Kernel Version in 2.2.x and 2.3.x Series 7. Known Problems and Bugs 8. Revision History 9. Acknowledgements ______________________________________________________________________ 1. Introduction This document describes the revision 1.06 of SiS 900/7016 Fast Ethernet device driver under Linux. The driver is developed by Silicon Integrated System Corp. and distributed freely under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The driver can be compiled as a loadable module and used under Linux kernel version 2.2.x. With minimal changes, the driver can also be used under 2.3.x kernel, please see section ``Installation''. If you are intended to use the driver for earlier kernels, you are on your own. The driver is tested with usual TCP/IP applications including FTP, Telnet, Netscape etc. and is used constantly by the developers. Please send all comments/fixes/questions to Ollie Lho. 2. License Copyright (C) 1999 Silicon Integrated System Corp. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA 3. Changes Changes made in Revision 1.06 1. Separation of sis900.c and sis900.h in order to move most constant definition to sis900.h (many of those constants were corrected) 2. Clean up PCI detection, the pci-scan from Donald Becker were not used, just simple pci_find_*. 3. MII detection is modified to support multiple mii transceiver. 4. Bugs in read_eeprom, mdio_* were removed. 5. Lot of sis900 irrelevant comments were removed/changed and more comments were added to reflect the real situation. 6. Clean up of physical/virtual address space mess in buffer descriptors. 7. Better transmit/receive error handling. 8. The driver now uses zero-copy single buffer management scheme to improve performance. 9. Names of variables were changed to be more consistent. 10. Clean up of auo-negotiation and timer code. 11. Automatic detection and change of PHY on the fly. 4. Tested Environment This driver is developed on the following hardware o Intel Celeron 336 with SiS 620 (rev 02) chipset o SiS 900 (rev 01) and SiS 7016/7014 Fast Ethernet Card and tested with these software environments o Red Hat Linux version 6.0 o Linux kernel version 2.2.13 o Netscape version 4.6 o NcFTP 3.0.0 beta 18 o Samba version 2.0.3 5. Files in This Package In the package you can find these files: sis900-2.2.x.c Driver source for kernel 2.2.x sis900-2.3.x.c Driver source for kernel 2.3.x sis900.h Header file for both 2.2.x and 2.3.x kernel sis900.sgml Linux-Doc SGML source of the document 6. Installation Silicon Integrated System Corp. is cooperating closely with core Linux Kernel developers. The revisions of SiS 900 driver are distributed by the usuall channels for kernel tar files and patches. Those kernel tar files for official kernel and patches for kernel pre-release can be download at official kernel ftp site and its mirrors. The 1.06 revision can be found in kernel version later than 2.3.15 and pre-2.2.14. If you have no prior experience in networking under Linux, please read Ethernet HOWTO and Networking HOWTO available from Linux Documentation Project (LDP). The installation procedure are different according to your kernel versions. 6.1. Kernel version later than 2.2.11 and 2.3.15 The driver is bundled in release later than 2.2.11 and 2.3.15 so this is the most easy case. Be sure you have the appropriate packages for compiling kernel source. Those packages are listed in Document/Changes in kernel source distribution. There are two alternative ways to install the driver 6.1.1. Building the driver as loadable module To build the driver as a loadable kernel module you have to reconfigure the kernel to activate network support by make config Choose "Network Device Support" to "Y" and "Ethernet Support" to "Y". Then you have to choose "SiS 900 Fast Ethernet Adapter Support" to "M". After reconfiguring the kernel, you can make the driver module by make modules The driver should be compiled with no errors. After compiling the driver, the driver can be installed to proper place by make modules_install Load the driver into kernel by insmod sis900 When loading the driver into memory, some information message can be view by dmesg or cat /var/log/message If the driver is loaded properly you will have messages similar to this: sis900.c: v1.06 11/04/99 eth0: SiS 900 PCI Fast Ethernet at 0xd000, IRQ 10, 00:00:e8:83:7f:a4. eth0: SiS 900 Internal MII PHY transceiver found at address 1. eth0: Using SiS 900 Internal MII PHY as default showing the version of the driver and the results of probing routine. Once the driver is loaded, network can be brought up by /sbin/ifconfig eth0 IPADDR broadcast BROADCAST netmask NETMASK where IPADDR, BROADCAST, NETMASK are your IP address, broadcast address and netmask respectively. For more information on how to configure network interface, please refer to Networking HOWTO. The link status is also shown by kernel messages. For example, after the network interface is activated, you may have the message: eth0: Media Link On 100mbps full-duplex If you try to unplug the twist pair (TP) cable you will get eth0: Media Link Off indicating that the link is failed. 6.1.2. Building the driver into kernel If you want to make the driver into kernel, choose "Y" rather than "M" on "SiS 900 Fast Ethernet Adapter Support" when configuring the kernel. Build the kernel image in the usual way make dep make clean make bzlilo Next time the system reboot, you have the driver in memory. 6.2. Earlier Kernel Version in 2.2.x and 2.3.x Series Installing the driver for earlier kernels in 2.2.x and 2.3.x series requires a little bit more work. First you have to copy sis900-2.x.x.c to /usr/src/linux/drivers/net/ and you have to modify some files manually (sorry !! no patch available !!) in Space.c, add extern int sis900_probe(struct device *dev); ... #ifdef CONFIG_SIS900 {sis900_probe,0}, #endif in Config.in add if [ "$CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL" = "y" ]; then ... //other adapter drivers tristate 'SiS 900 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter Support' CONFIG_SIS900 ... //other adapter drivers fi in Makefile add ifeq ($(CONFIG_SIS900),y) L_OBJS += sis900.o else ifeq ($(CONFIG_SIS900),m) M_OBJS += sis900.o endif endif After modifying these files, the driver can be build as described in the previous section. 7. Known Problems and Bugs There are some known problems and bugs. If you find any other bugs please mail to ollie@sis.com.tw 1. AM79C901 HomePNA PHY is not thoroughly tested, there may be some bugs in the "on the fly" change of transceiver. 2. A bug is hidden somewhere in the receive buffer management code, the bug causes NULL pointer reference in the kernel. This fault is caught before bad things happen and reported with the message: eth0: NULL pointer encountered in Rx ring, skipping which can be viewed with dmesg or cat /var/log/message. 8. Revision History o November 4, 1999, Revision 1.06, Second release, lots of clean up and optimization. o August 8, 1999, Revision 1.05, Initial Public Release 9. Acknowledgements This driver was originally derived form Donald Becker's pci-skeleton and rtl8139 drivers. Donald also provided various suggestion regarded with improvements made in revision 1.06. The 1.05 revision was created by Jim Huang, AMD 79c901 support was added by Chin-Shan Li.