Re: [gentoo-amd64] forcedeth weirdness - a bedtime story

[Chris Forsyth]

Don't feel bad man, I have customers replace whole PC because the 
machine "wouldn't boot." They refused to pull the plug and press the 
power button instead they purchased a new machines.

Chris



Kevin F. Quinn wrote:
> Just figured out a nasty forcedeth network issue, so here's the details
> if anyone is interested.
>
> My new amd64 box, a cheap Compaq desktop (AMD64 3800+, nVidia
> MCP51 chipset), doesn't start the network properly when booting of the
> 2006.0 livecd (or universal cd, for that matter).  Obviously it came
> with Windows XP, and I'm setting it up to dual boot with Gentoo on a
> second SATA drive (drives are cheap, and it saves having to risk
> resizing the NTFS partitions).
>
> I'd gone as far as buying a (cheap!) PCI network card; installed it and
> booted from the CD - only to discover that not only did the new card
> configure properly, but so did the on-board forcedeth one, that failed
> consistently before!  So, removed the PCI card, booted up and yes, the
> forcedeth stuff came up fine again.  Bizarre.
>
> Later, I rebooted to Windows for a while, then shutdown and rebooted
> from the livecd again - only to find the network was failing again! :(
> At this point, it occurred to me that perhaps there is something the
> Windows driver does to the chip that the forcedeth driver fails to
> reset, leaving the chip in a not-working state.  Pulled the power cord
> out, stuffed it back in thinking this would ensure the device was reset
> properly - but no :( still it failed.
>
> Crawled under the desk to put the PCI card back in again, and noticed
> that after pulling the power cord out the power supply led remained lit
> for quite some seconds (5 to 10!).  Ahah - fancy-pants PSU, I thought;
> obviously pulling the cable out and re-inserting it isn't enough to
> remove power.  After the light had gone out, just powered up again
> (without putting the PCI card in after all) and lo, the interface came
> up fine.
>
> So the moral of the story is, if you're switching between Windows and
> Linux and see this problem, the way to get around it is to completely
> remove power and wait long enough for the PSU to switch off completely
> before powering up.
>
> I suspect later kernel versions may have this fixed - quite a few
> changes went in to the forcedeth driver around 2.17.3, but until I have
> the kernel built I can't say...
>
> BTW anyone else think of the "Master Control Program" whenever you see
> "nVidia MCP51" ;)
>
>

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