LANCE driver for VMWare 4

Submitted by Chris Cole on Thu, 03/18/2004 - 13:01.

Hi All,

I have checked-in additions to the Lance Ethernet device driver, to make it work with VMWare 4.0 (I hope Smiling. I have provided details about limitations in the 'JNode development drivers' JNode-Net forum. One of the main issues that I ran into was that I struggled to get the device to read/write the receive and transmit descriptors that are located in ram. The device uses PCI bus mastering to read this memory, and I spent countless hours trying to figure out why this wasn't working. Finally I found the problem, which was the PCI command register needed to be set to enable it to become a PCI bus master with the following line of code:

device.writeConfigByte(
PCIConstants.PCI_COMMAND,
device.readConfigByte(PCIConstants.PCI_COMMAND)
| PCIConstants.PCI_COMMAND_MASTER);

The device driver still needs some work, specifically, making it more efficient, handling error conditions, and expanding support for other devices than AMD PCnet PCI II Am79C970A.

I would be interested if this works for other people and if it works outside VMWare 4.0. I plan on continuing work on the driver and would be interested in any comments.

‹ vmware 4 DHCP command error ›

No full luck on vmware 3

Submitted by admin on Thu, 03/18/2004 - 19:21.

Hi, I get an "ERROR [TxDescriptorRing]: Not owner of descriptor index 0" when trying to "bootp eth0" in VMWare 3 under windows.
It does seem to continue afterwards. (Just no luck with the card settings yet)

During boot, i see a "Found PCnet/PCI II 79C970A at 0x1000 with MAC ..." message.

Ewout

Lance driver on VMWare 3

Submitted by Chris Cole on Sat, 03/20/2004 - 06:11.

I am looking for someone with VMWare 3 to grab some data, so that I can find the problem with the Lance Ethernet driver (I have VMWare 4). First, with the virtual network device setup in VMWare do you get “INFO [LanceCore] PCnet/PCI II 79C970A Initialization Complete” after the “INFO [LanceCore] Found PCnet/PCI II 79C970A at 0x1060 …”

Also, I have checked-in a commented debug statement that will stop the driver on a request to transimt and log a bunch of debug info, that should allow me to further isolate the problem. Here are the steps to get the info:

1. get the latest updates from CVS
2. uncomment the dumpDebugInfo() call in LanceCore.transmit
3. build jnode
4. run jnode on VMWare 3 (with network device)
5. run bootp command “bootp eth0”
6. bunch of data should be output on the log page (alt-F7)

If possible I would like all the data someone knows of a way to cut output from VMWare. But I am not sure if this is possible and I know that no one would want to copy all this data by hand:-). So, here is a list of the data that would be most helpful starting from the top of the log.

1. CSR0 = ?
2. Initialization block data
3. Receive descriptor 0 data
4. Transmit descriptor 0 data
5. The following CSR registers 1, 2, 24, 25, 30, 31, 58, 76, 78

Thanks,

Chris

Try contacting me on MSN

Submitted by admin on Sat, 03/20/2004 - 10:23.

Hi Chris, try to contact me on MSN (or mail), then we might be able to solve this interactively.

Ewout

I've got tested it on VMWare

Submitted by galatnm on Thu, 03/18/2004 - 19:35.

I've got tested it on VMWare 4 and it's works, "dhcp eth0" command works and ping command works too.

Great work chris ^^

Fabien.