Ethernet problem on 7200

For some unknown reason, I had trouble getting this message to post. Here
is is without the Re: in it. It is related to a number of problems I
and other uses have been having with mace and 53c94 drivers on various
PowerMac 7200's.

It's been my experience with several machines that the mace driver doesn't
work most of the time on the 7200.

Not sure why. The stats are useless. I've tried it with the built-in
RJ45 and with the AAUI to TP transceiver as well. I'm pretty certain it
isn't a duplex problem. It appears to be dropping incoming packets.

Only thing you can do (other than fix it ;) is to put in a PCI ethernet
card. I can tell you that most any tulip (21xxx) based card will work as
well as the ne2k-pci clones (realtek, etc chips).

It a bummer for me as I'm out of slots and I need to add a decent scsi card.

The 53c94 scsi driver appears to have serious problems on the 7200 as well.
I can't even write a CD at 1x with it without the fifo emptying even
with a big buffer and less than 50 megs of data! It looks like it
may not be doing disconnects properly, the raw speed is OK when testing
with iozone it's only about 40% slower than a controller in the
PCI slot. However when it has to wait for the CDwriter to do something
that doesn't return right away, it just appears to hang the machine.
Eventually it comes back when the writer is finished (i.e. fixating).
(no it's not the cable).

If I take out one of the ethernet cards and put in a 2940 I can write at 4x
without the buffer getting less than 98% full!!! Heck, my 68k performa
can write at 4x in MacOs.

I've tried this with a bunch of kernels and am currently running the
2.2.17pre7 version.

Bob
--
Robert E. Brose II    N0QBJ
http://www.jriver.com/~bob/
bob@kunk.jriver.com

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