Re: Ethernet not so good.
> I got an Asante Nubus ethernet card for my Quadra 840AV because the
> built-in card is not supported. (I can't get over how backwards that is!)
Let me explain it, in simple terms: There's only about 4 people working on
the Mac kernel support, only one of these has a Quadra AV machine.
Apple refused to document any hardware design details, and even though the
MACE ethernet chipset is supported by another Linux architecture, the
Apple DMA engine could not be figured out. If you have a good idea how to
reverse engineer the AV DMA engine, go ahead and submit patches. If you
have no idea what I'm talking about, who are you to say this is so
backwards?
> The system detects the card now, but it functions really poorly. I know
> that the card is fine, because I use it in MacOS mode also. This new card
> is an improvement, because it is detected and I can ping myself
> successfully now, but in pinging myself, I get an average time of about 0.9
> ms (slow) and about 10% packet loss. Also, I still can't ping anything else
> on my network. I am a total newbie user and probably just configured it wrong.
1) 0.9 ms isn't that slow, 2) there's little doubt the card (and config)
is fine, but Apple used such a braindead interrupt implementation,
especially for Nubus, that I'm not surprised about some latency. I've seen
your complaint about slow console scrolling: if it's _really_ slow (a
second per line or so) this would indicate your machine being drowned by
interrupts from a device the kernel can't handle properly, resulting in
high ethernet latency and slow scrolling. I assume you disconnected the
MACE ethernet cable so what's left might be the video card VBL interrupt.
Check the booter settings and make sure the "don't disable VBL interrupts"
option is off.
You can try to petition Apple and Asante to release hardware specs for
long-obsolete technology BTW. I doubt they'll bother to react.
Michael
Reply to: