Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 21802
Problems with Xircom adapter
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:30:08 EDT
I have RH7.0+updates running on a DELL Inspiron 3800 notebook. As the networking card I have Xircom 10/100 CE.. networking card (no modem). The card is recognized by linux and it actually works (uses tulip_cb driver) BUT when trasferring files it becomes extremely slow. I substitute the PCMCIA card with a 3Com card and it is blazingly fast. I read about problems with Xircom cards but could not find a solution. I ported the pcmcia-3.1.22 package and started using that but that did not solve the problem either. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
The card is Xircom CBE2-100
I have been playing around with a Xircom CBEM56G under RedHat 7.2. This laptop used to work great under RedHat 6.2. It has always had problems with newer releases unless I rebuilt the kernel with an old PCMCIA driver set from the 6.2 days. Recently I am having some success with a 2.4.9-21 kernel if I do the following: 1) shut down networking (service network stop) 2) remove the xircom_cb module (modprobe -r xircom_cb) 3) add the xircom_tulip_cb module (modprobe xircom_tulip_cb) 4) restart networking (service network start) I have a script in /etc/init.d which does just this. Using netperf perfomance went form < 20 Mbits/sec to > 75 Mbits/sec. My question is, how is this selection supposed to be made without resorting to a seperate init.d script? I have tried changing the /etc/pcmcia/config file with no luck. I also saw references to hotplug. I saw that xircom_tulip_cb was in /etc/hotplug/blacklist. I removed it and inserted xircom_cb in it's place. This got me no xircom module loaded at all until I did it manually.
OK, I saw another xircom thread that mentioned using an "alias eth0 xircom_tulib_cb" entry in /etc/modules.conf. This has eliminated the need to run an init.d script.
xircom_tulip_cb now handles this not quite tulip hw fine