[SPARCbook] Re: Start-from-scratch full procedure for PCMCIA ethernet card?

[Rich Kulawiec]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2002 at 09:57:25AM +0100, Chris Powell wrote:
> If I remember correctly, just inserting the card will wake up the PCMCIA
> daemon (provided you have it installed - check for PCMCIA drivers using
> pkginfo) and create the /dev entries (not sure you even need to boot -r).
> If your card doesn't say on it '3c589B' or '3c589C' then it's probably
> NOT supported - even the plain '3c589' and other '3cXXX' cards are not
> supported.
> 
> So, do this:
> 
> 1. Check the card is 3c589B or 3c589C.
> 2. Check you have PCMCIA drivers installed - pkginfo | grep -i pcmcia
> 3. Reboot machine with boot -r (to be on the safe side).
> 4. Check /dev and /var/adm/messages for any reference to 'pcelx'.

Okay, let me run this by the numbers and see if you or somebody can't
figure out where I've blown.

1. Card is 3c589C.  Looking good.

2. 'pkcinfo | grep -i pcmcia" yields

	system      TADpcmcia      PCMCIA S/W

so that looks good.

3. Ah.  Here's where trouble starts.  Trying to reboot with the card
in the PCMCIA slot causing the machine to spin for a very long time
(CPU spinner continuously busy) while in the midst of making the
entries in the /dev directory.  As soon as I popped the card out,
it finished, moved on to making the entries the /devices directory,
and completed booting.

4. /dev and /var/adm/messages appear to be uncontaminated by anything
having to do with pcelx. ;-)  Inserting the card post-boot doesn't seem
to cause this happen either, although the system does "see it", i.e.
I can run NCE2_pcmcia and note that the card's been identified as being
in slot 0.

Let me go back to something you said earlier:

> If I remember correctly, just inserting the card will wake up the PCMCIA
> daemon (provided you have it installed 

I don't see any running process which corresponds to this; however, this
machine does have functional PCMCIA because I can pop in a modem card
(indicates US Robotics 56K with XJACK) at which point the system recognizes
it, turns on the little card indicator box in the LCD display, and then
proceed to use it just fine.  So I'm confused: is this what you were
referring to, or did you mean a continuously running process that
spends most of its time sleep()ing?

I have the feeling that I'm still overlooking the marvelously obvious,
and that I'm going to feel correspondingly stupid when that's corrected.

---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
rsk at magpage.com