2 SiS 900/7016 Fast Ethernet Device Driver
8 Copyright © 1999 by Silicon Integrated System Corp.
10 This document gives some information on installation and usage of SiS
11 900/7016 device driver under Linux.
13 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
14 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
15 the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at
16 your option) any later version.
18 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
19 WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
20 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
21 General Public License for more details.
23 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
24 along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
25 Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307
27 _________________________________________________________________
33 4. Files in This Package
36 Building the driver as loadable module
37 Building the driver into kernel
39 6. Known Problems and Bugs
42 _________________________________________________________________
44 Chapter 1. Introduction
46 This document describes the revision 1.06 and 1.07 of SiS 900/7016
47 Fast Ethernet device driver under Linux. The driver is developed by
48 Silicon Integrated System Corp. and distributed freely under the GNU
49 General Public License (GPL). The driver can be compiled as a loadable
50 module and used under Linux kernel version 2.2.x. (rev. 1.06) With
51 minimal changes, the driver can also be used under 2.3.x and 2.4.x
52 kernel (rev. 1.07), please see Chapter 5. If you are intended to use
53 the driver for earlier kernels, you are on your own.
55 The driver is tested with usual TCP/IP applications including FTP,
56 Telnet, Netscape etc. and is used constantly by the developers.
58 Please send all comments/fixes/questions to Lei-Chun Chang.
59 _________________________________________________________________
63 Changes made in Revision 1.07
65 1. Separation of sis900.c and sis900.h in order to move most constant
66 definition to sis900.h (many of those constants were corrected)
67 2. Clean up PCI detection, the pci-scan from Donald Becker were not
68 used, just simple pci_find_*.
69 3. MII detection is modified to support multiple mii transceiver.
70 4. Bugs in read_eeprom, mdio_* were removed.
71 5. Lot of sis900 irrelevant comments were removed/changed and more
72 comments were added to reflect the real situation.
73 6. Clean up of physical/virtual address space mess in buffer
75 7. Better transmit/receive error handling.
76 8. The driver now uses zero-copy single buffer management scheme to
78 9. Names of variables were changed to be more consistent.
79 10. Clean up of auo-negotiation and timer code.
80 11. Automatic detection and change of PHY on the fly.
81 12. Bug in mac probing fixed.
82 13. Fix 630E equalier problem by modifying the equalizer workaround
84 14. Support for ICS1893 10/100 Interated PHYceiver.
85 15. Support for media select by ifconfig.
86 16. Added kernel-doc extratable documentation.
87 _________________________________________________________________
89 Chapter 3. Tested Environment
91 This driver is developed on the following hardware
93 * Intel Celeron 500 with SiS 630 (rev 02) chipset
94 * SiS 900 (rev 01) and SiS 7016/7014 Fast Ethernet Card
96 and tested with these software environments
98 * Red Hat Linux version 6.2
99 * Linux kernel version 2.4.0
100 * Netscape version 4.6
101 * NcFTP 3.0.0 beta 18
102 * Samba version 2.0.3
103 _________________________________________________________________
105 Chapter 4. Files in This Package
107 In the package you can find these files:
110 Driver source file in C
113 Header file for sis900.c
116 DocBook SGML source of the document
119 Driver document in plain text
120 _________________________________________________________________
122 Chapter 5. Installation
124 Silicon Integrated System Corp. is cooperating closely with core Linux
125 Kernel developers. The revisions of SiS 900 driver are distributed by
126 the usuall channels for kernel tar files and patches. Those kernel tar
127 files for official kernel and patches for kernel pre-release can be
128 download at official kernel ftp site and its mirrors. The 1.06
129 revision can be found in kernel version later than 2.3.15 and
130 pre-2.2.14, and 1.07 revision can be found in kernel version 2.4.0. If
131 you have no prior experience in networking under Linux, please read
132 Ethernet HOWTO and Networking HOWTO available from Linux Documentation
135 The driver is bundled in release later than 2.2.11 and 2.3.15 so this
136 is the most easy case. Be sure you have the appropriate packages for
137 compiling kernel source. Those packages are listed in Document/Changes
138 in kernel source distribution. If you have to install the driver other
139 than those bundled in kernel release, you should have your driver file
140 sis900.c and sis900.h copied into /usr/src/linux/drivers/net/ first.
141 There are two alternative ways to install the driver
142 _________________________________________________________________
144 Building the driver as loadable module
146 To build the driver as a loadable kernel module you have to
147 reconfigure the kernel to activate network support by
151 Choose "Loadable module support --->", then select "Enable loadable
154 Choose "Network Device Support --->", select "Ethernet (10 or
155 100Mbit)". Then select "EISA, VLB, PCI and on board controllers", and
156 choose "SiS 900/7016 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter support" to "M".
158 After reconfiguring the kernel, you can make the driver module by
162 The driver should be compiled with no errors. After compiling the
163 driver, the driver can be installed to proper place by
167 Load the driver into kernel by
171 When loading the driver into memory, some information message can be
179 If the driver is loaded properly you will have messages similar to
182 sis900.c: v1.07.06 11/07/2000
183 eth0: SiS 900 PCI Fast Ethernet at 0xd000, IRQ 10, 00:00:e8:83:7f:a4.
184 eth0: SiS 900 Internal MII PHY transceiver found at address 1.
185 eth0: Using SiS 900 Internal MII PHY as default
187 showing the version of the driver and the results of probing routine.
189 Once the driver is loaded, network can be brought up by
191 /sbin/ifconfig eth0 IPADDR broadcast BROADCAST netmask NETMASK media TYPE
193 where IPADDR, BROADCAST, NETMASK are your IP address, broadcast
194 address and netmask respectively. TYPE is used to set medium type used
195 by the device. Typical values are "10baseT"(twisted-pair 10Mbps
196 Ethernet) or "100baseT" (twisted-pair 100Mbps Ethernet). For more
197 information on how to configure network interface, please refer to
200 The link status is also shown by kernel messages. For example, after
201 the network interface is activated, you may have the message:
203 eth0: Media Link On 100mbps full-duplex
205 If you try to unplug the twist pair (TP) cable you will get
209 indicating that the link is failed.
210 _________________________________________________________________
212 Building the driver into kernel
214 If you want to make the driver into kernel, choose "Y" rather than "M"
215 on "SiS 900/7016 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter support" when configuring
216 the kernel. Build the kernel image in the usual way
222 Next time the system reboot, you have the driver in memory.
223 _________________________________________________________________
225 Chapter 6. Known Problems and Bugs
227 There are some known problems and bugs. If you find any other bugs
228 please mail to lcchang@sis.com.tw
230 1. AM79C901 HomePNA PHY is not thoroughly tested, there may be some
231 bugs in the "on the fly" change of transceiver.
232 2. A bug is hidden somewhere in the receive buffer management code,
233 the bug causes NULL pointer reference in the kernel. This fault is
234 caught before bad things happen and reported with the message:
235 eth0: NULL pointer encountered in Rx ring, skipping which can be
236 viewed with dmesg or cat /var/log/message.
237 3. The media type change from 10Mbps to 100Mbps twisted-pair ethernet
238 by ifconfig causes the media link down.
239 _________________________________________________________________
241 Chapter 7. Revision History
243 * November 13, 2000, Revision 1.07, seventh release, 630E problem
244 fixed and further clean up.
245 * November 4, 1999, Revision 1.06, Second release, lots of clean up
247 * August 8, 1999, Revision 1.05, Initial Public Release
248 _________________________________________________________________
250 Chapter 8. Acknowledgements
252 This driver was originally derived form Donald Becker's pci-skeleton
253 and rtl8139 drivers. Donald also provided various suggestion regarded
254 with improvements made in revision 1.06.
256 The 1.05 revision was created by Jim Huang, AMD 79c901 support was
257 added by Chin-Shan Li.