See if anyone can divine any greater meaning in these events:
* My machine, medusa, is a StrongARMed RiscPC with 34MB of RAM,
labelled `RiscPC' on the front (as opposed to -[67]00).
* My Ethernet card is an old podule Ether3, which has always worked
fine. After a reboot a few days ago, it stopped working, claiming
`eth0: can't identify podule bus width' (or similar), and whatever
I did with kernel options, it absolutely refused to budge again.
The salient details are probably these: with `debug' as a kernel
parameter, I get the following output:
0: [0053:00A4] ANT Ethernet (...)
ether3_probe: write8 [01:00], read8 [05:05]
ether3_probe: write16 [0101], read16 [0105]
eth0: unable to identify podule bus width
When I added a hack to force it to select BUS_16 if it couldn't
identify the card type, I then got a whole load of gibberish about
failing the RAM test, the contents of which I've lost, unfortunately.
* This morning, upon rebooting the machine, the Ethernet card magically
came back to life! With nothing more than a reboot, the Ethernet
card started identifying and working again under Linux.
* Suspicious of the card, I swiped a handy EtherB NIC slot card, and
tried that out. Booted up -- same complaint about not being able
to identify the podule bus width, but with my hack in place, it
went on to boot up and apparently function absolutely normally.
I rebooted a few times, and intermittently it would tell me that
it hadn't identified the podule bus width, and was defaulting to 16,
or just `work', without a problem. This shouldn't be intermittent,
surely? Is the udelay() not big enough on the read and writes?
* Here's the ultimately weird bit. With the now-decided-to-work
Ether3 in place, the machine boots up, lets me log in as root and
type `halt' and shutdown in about 1:35 (repeated over three test runs).
With the EtherB in place, exactly the same procedure takes 1:55 on
average. Where the hell are those extra 20 seconds going?
--
Chris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ( http://www.fluff.org/chris )
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