2.4.23-BK9 and DC21142/3

I just installed 2.4.23-bk9 on a system with a ethernet card that
lscpi reports as DC21142 which is a quad port card. When the machine came up it auto negotiated half duplex instead of full. On 2.4.21-ac4 it negotiated Full.

I searched around the bugzilla and couldn't find anything relevant but
it could just be my searching sucks.

Any ideas? I don't believe that passing an append parameter would be
good as it would have to be done to about 50 servers.

Robert

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Robert L. Harris | GPG Key ID: E344DA3B

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DISCLAIMER:
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What driver are you using?

I've had some similar problems recently and had to increase the autonegotiation timeout in a network driver to make the result of the autonegotiation stable, otherwise sometimes it would be HD sometimes FD. The reason was apparently that the driver would fall back to another method of determining the link speed and this other method limited itself to half duplex. I even seem to remember that it occasionally decided to fall back to 10Mb/s half duplex...

It also may depend on the switches and the MII transceiver brand you use, the combinations I have now seems especially slow at autonegotiation. I have 2 sets of very similar systems, 6 of one kind and 4 of another. The first 6 have the same exact components (DC21140 with National MII transceiver) AFAICT but a slightly different PCB revision it seems, the slightly older ones are more affected than later revisions. The last 4 are strictly identical:
DC21143 with Level One (now Intel AFAIR) transceivers, and all 4 behave identically.

At least it does not seem to depend on the phase of the moon :-)

I'm still using 2.2 with de4x5 driver, but there were very few differences with the 2.4 version of the driver last time I looked.

Gabriel