# SiS 900/7016 Fast Ethernet Device Driver

## 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 install. 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.

## 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.

## 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

## 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

## 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 dep

    make clean

    make bzlilo

Next time the system reboot, you have the driver in memory.

## 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.

## Revision History

- November 13, 2000, Revision 1.07, seventh release, 630E problem fixed and furthur 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

## 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.

## List of Functions

!Idrivers/net/sis900.c