
SiS 900/7016 Fast Ethernet Device Driver

Ollie Lho

Lei Chun Chang

   Copyright © 1999 by Silicon Integrated System Corp.
   
   This document gives some information on installation and usage of SiS
   900/7016 device driver under Linux.
   
   This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
   it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
   the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at
   your option) any later version.
   
   This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
   WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
   MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
   General Public License for more details.
   
   You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
   along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
   Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307
   USA
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   Table of Contents
   1. Introduction
   2. Changes
   3. Tested Environment
   4. Files in This Package
   5. Installation
          
        Building the driver as loadable module
        Building the driver into kernel
                
   6. Known Problems and Bugs
   7. Revision History
   8. Acknowledgements
     _________________________________________________________________
   
Chapter 1. Introduction

   This document describes the revision 1.06 and 1.07 of SiS 900/7016
   Fast Ethernet device driver under Linux. The driver is developed by
   Silicon Integrated System Corp. and distributed freely under the GNU
   General Public License (GPL). The driver can be compiled as a loadable
   module and used under Linux kernel version 2.2.x. (rev. 1.06) With
   minimal changes, the driver can also be used under 2.3.x and 2.4.x
   kernel (rev. 1.07), please see Chapter 5. If you are intended to use
   the driver for earlier kernels, you are on your own.
   
   The driver is tested with usual TCP/IP applications including FTP,
   Telnet, Netscape etc. and is used constantly by the developers.
   
   Please send all comments/fixes/questions to Lei-Chun Chang.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
Chapter 2. Changes

   Changes made in Revision 1.07
   
    1. Separation of sis900.c and sis900.h in order to move most constant
       definition to sis900.h (many of those constants were corrected)
    2. Clean up PCI detection, the pci-scan from Donald Becker were not
       used, just simple pci_find_*.
    3. MII detection is modified to support multiple mii transceiver.
    4. Bugs in read_eeprom, mdio_* were removed.
    5. Lot of sis900 irrelevant comments were removed/changed and more
       comments were added to reflect the real situation.
    6. Clean up of physical/virtual address space mess in buffer
       descriptors.
    7. Better transmit/receive error handling.
    8. The driver now uses zero-copy single buffer management scheme to
       improve performance.
    9. Names of variables were changed to be more consistent.
   10. Clean up of auo-negotiation and timer code.
   11. Automatic detection and change of PHY on the fly.
   12. Bug in mac probing fixed.
   13. Fix 630E equalier problem by modifying the equalizer workaround
       rule.
   14. Support for ICS1893 10/100 Interated PHYceiver.
   15. Support for media select by ifconfig.
   16. Added kernel-doc extratable documentation.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
Chapter 3. Tested Environment

   This driver is developed on the following hardware
   
     * Intel Celeron 500 with SiS 630 (rev 02) chipset
     * SiS 900 (rev 01) and SiS 7016/7014 Fast Ethernet Card
       
   and tested with these software environments
   
     * Red Hat Linux version 6.2
     * Linux kernel version 2.4.0
     * Netscape version 4.6
     * NcFTP 3.0.0 beta 18
     * Samba version 2.0.3
     _________________________________________________________________
   
Chapter 4. Files in This Package

   In the package you can find these files:
   
   sis900.c
          Driver source file in C
          
   sis900.h
          Header file for sis900.c
          
   sis900.sgml
          DocBook SGML source of the document
          
   sis900.txt
          Driver document in plain text
     _________________________________________________________________
   
Chapter 5. Installation

   Silicon Integrated System Corp. is cooperating closely with core Linux
   Kernel developers. The revisions of SiS 900 driver are distributed by
   the usuall channels for kernel tar files and patches. Those kernel tar
   files for official kernel and patches for kernel pre-release can be
   download at official kernel ftp site and its mirrors. The 1.06
   revision can be found in kernel version later than 2.3.15 and
   pre-2.2.14, and 1.07 revision can be found in kernel version 2.4.0. If
   you have no prior experience in networking under Linux, please read
   Ethernet HOWTO and Networking HOWTO available from Linux Documentation
   Project (LDP).
   
   The driver is bundled in release later than 2.2.11 and 2.3.15 so this
   is the most easy case. Be sure you have the appropriate packages for
   compiling kernel source. Those packages are listed in Document/Changes
   in kernel source distribution. If you have to install the driver other
   than those bundled in kernel release, you should have your driver file
   sis900.c and sis900.h copied into /usr/src/linux/drivers/net/ first.
   There are two alternative ways to install the driver
     _________________________________________________________________
   
Building the driver as loadable module

   To build the driver as a loadable kernel module you have to
   reconfigure the kernel to activate network support by
   
make menuconfig

   Choose "Loadable module support --->", then select "Enable loadable
   module support".
   
   Choose "Network Device Support --->", select "Ethernet (10 or
   100Mbit)". Then select "EISA, VLB, PCI and on board controllers", and
   choose "SiS 900/7016 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter support" to "M".
   
   After reconfiguring the kernel, you can make the driver module by
   
make modules

   The driver should be compiled with no errors. After compiling the
   driver, the driver can be installed to proper place by
   
make modules_install

   Load the driver into kernel by
   
insmod sis900

   When loading the driver into memory, some information message can be
   view by
   
dmesg

   or
cat /var/log/message

   If the driver is loaded properly you will have messages similar to
   this:
   
sis900.c: v1.07.06  11/07/2000
eth0: SiS 900 PCI Fast Ethernet at 0xd000, IRQ 10, 00:00:e8:83:7f:a4.
eth0: SiS 900 Internal MII PHY transceiver found at address 1.
eth0: Using SiS 900 Internal MII PHY as default

   showing the version of the driver and the results of probing routine.
   
   Once the driver is loaded, network can be brought up by
   
/sbin/ifconfig eth0 IPADDR broadcast BROADCAST netmask NETMASK media TYPE

   where IPADDR, BROADCAST, NETMASK are your IP address, broadcast
   address and netmask respectively. TYPE is used to set medium type used
   by the device. Typical values are "10baseT"(twisted-pair 10Mbps
   Ethernet) or "100baseT" (twisted-pair 100Mbps Ethernet). For more
   information on how to configure network interface, please refer to
   Networking HOWTO.
   
   The link status is also shown by kernel messages. For example, after
   the network interface is activated, you may have the message:
   
eth0: Media Link On 100mbps full-duplex

   If you try to unplug the twist pair (TP) cable you will get
   
eth0: Media Link Off

   indicating that the link is failed.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
Building the driver into kernel

   If you want to make the driver into kernel, choose "Y" rather than "M"
   on "SiS 900/7016 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter support" when configuring
   the kernel. Build the kernel image in the usual way
   
make clean

make bzlilo

   Next time the system reboot, you have the driver in memory.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
Chapter 6. Known Problems and Bugs

   There are some known problems and bugs. If you find any other bugs
   please mail to lcchang@sis.com.tw
   
    1. AM79C901 HomePNA PHY is not thoroughly tested, there may be some
       bugs in the "on the fly" change of transceiver.
    2. A bug is hidden somewhere in the receive buffer management code,
       the bug causes NULL pointer reference in the kernel. This fault is
       caught before bad things happen and reported with the message:
       eth0: NULL pointer encountered in Rx ring, skipping which can be
       viewed with dmesg or cat /var/log/message.
    3. The media type change from 10Mbps to 100Mbps twisted-pair ethernet
       by ifconfig causes the media link down.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
Chapter 7. Revision History

     * November 13, 2000, Revision 1.07, seventh release, 630E problem
       fixed and further clean up.
     * November 4, 1999, Revision 1.06, Second release, lots of clean up
       and optimization.
     * August 8, 1999, Revision 1.05, Initial Public Release
     _________________________________________________________________
   
Chapter 8. Acknowledgements

   This driver was originally derived form Donald Becker's pci-skeleton
   and rtl8139 drivers. Donald also provided various suggestion regarded
   with improvements made in revision 1.06.
   
   The 1.05 revision was created by Jim Huang, AMD 79c901 support was
   added by Chin-Shan Li.
