[Novalug] Sun Quad Fast Ethernet PCI card works with X86 Linux

Brian Leeper brian.leeper@gmail.com
Sat Mar 15 22:40:02 EDT 2008


I read somewhere that Sun Quad Fast Ethernet cards (X1034a option) will work
in an X86 machine with the Linux sunhme driver. I'd been thinking about
getting a multiport Ethernet card to save PCI slots in my Linux machine (it
only has 4).

The SUN cards are not very expensive on Ebay ($8-$15 plus shipping) so I
bought a couple.

I just installed the card in my Linux machine today and it works fine. My
Linux machine is a dual PIII550. Despite the card being a 64-bit PCIX card,
it works fine in a 32-bit slot. Here's the kernel message where it's
detected when I insmod the sunhme driver (kernel 2.4.32).


sunhme.c:v2.01 26/Mar/2002 David S. Miller (davem@redhat.com)
eth2-5: Quattro HME (PCI/CheerIO) 10/100baseT Ethernet DEC 21153 PCI Bridge
eth2: Quattro HME slot 0 (PCI/CheerIO) 10/100baseT Ethernet
08:00:20:xx:xx:14
eth3: Quattro HME slot 1 (PCI/CheerIO) 10/100baseT Ethernet
08:00:20:xx:xx:15
eth4: Quattro HME slot 2 (PCI/CheerIO) 10/100baseT Ethernet
08:00:20:xx:xx:16
eth5: Quattro HME slot 3 (PCI/CheerIO) 10/100baseT Ethernet
08:00:20:xx:xx:17

I censored the ethernet addresses. I plugged it into a spare PC with Windows
XP on it to test it and XP detects the card but can't find a driver for it.
I was going to boot it with Knoppix but since my CD-ROM drive wouldn't eject
before XP started, XP detected the card and asked for a driver. Knoppix
detected the card and grabbed an IP via DHCP with no problem.

I looked for an XP driver for this card but I couldn't find one. Not
surprising.

It works great with Linux which is what I wanted it for. Right now I have my
wireless access point plugged into one of the ports and my 10/100 switch
(with a Linksys VOIP adapter on it) plugged into the other port.

You can use ethtool with these interfaces to set the speed like so:

ethtool -s eth2 speed 10 duplex half autoneg off

This is useful because I have a cat3 cable connecting the wireless access
point to eth2. Otherwise it autonegotiates at 100mb. This seems to work but
I'm not sure how reliable it would be, running 100mb over cat3.

If you need an inexpensive quad port Ethernet card, you might consider this
one. It's been working just fine (despite the comments in the
sunhme.cdriver that lead me to think it's the buggiest Ethernet card
out there....).

The only wierdness I've encountered is that the older version of the card
(270-4366) is assigned a different MAC address for each interface,
incrementing by 1, as you can see above. The newer version of the card
(501-5406) gets the same address for each interface, which is the first
address on the card (there are stickers on the card listing the MAC address
for each of the 4 interfaces so the driver should be incrementing the
addresses for the newer version of the card too).

I don't think this should cause any problems since Sun systems historically
used the same MAC address for all of the ethernet interfaces in a given
system.
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