sis900 Foxconn 661FX7MI-S PHY support

This patch is required to get sis900 ethernet working well on a Foxconn 661FX7MI-S motherboard which uses the SiS 661FX chipset. The patch adds an entry to mii_chip_info for the transceiver.

The PHY ids were found using the sis900_c_122.diff patch from
http://brownhat.org/sis900.html but that patch didn't solve the problem, because the PHY at address 1 was already being chosen.

Without my patch, when bursts of packets arrive from other hosts on a LAN, the interface dropped one roughly 10% of the time, causing retransmits. There were fifth second pauses in refresh of large xterms, and it made Netrek suck. I can provide further test data.

Workaround in lieu of patch is to use mii-tool to advertise 100baseTx-HD, then force renegotiation.

I wasn't able to identify the actual transceiver, so the description field is a guess.

This patch is similar to Artur Skawina's patch:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-netdev&m=114297516729079&w=2

I'm not sure, but I wonder if it means the default behaviour should be changed, so as to better handle future transceivers.

Diff is against 2.6.16.13.

@@ -127,6 +127,7 @@
 } mii_chip_table[] = {
 	{ "SiS 900 Internal MII PHY", 		0x001d, 0x8000, LAN },
 	{ "SiS 7014 Physical Layer Solution", 	0x0016, 0xf830, LAN },
+	{ "SiS 900 on Foxconn 661 7MI",         0x0143, 0xBC70, LAN },
 	{ "Altimata AC101LF PHY",               0x0022, 0x5520, LAN },
 	{ "AMD 79C901 10BASE-T PHY",  		0x0000, 0x6B70, LAN },
 	{ "AMD 79C901 HomePNA PHY",		0x0000, 0x6B90, HOME},

Il giorno 10/mag/06, alle ore 19:31, Stephen Hemminger ha scritto:

Well, my previous experience showed that the current default was the best, but obviously, when I decided that, things began to change. Since it is quite easy to add new transceivers this is hardly a big problem.

Ack. :-)

Thanks.
--
Daniele Venzano
http://www.brownhat.org