764 replies to this topic

[wkweksl]

It works now! Thanks planetbeing!

[johnzbesko]

I'm writing this post using Safari and the latest forcedeth driver! Thank you for your efforts. I now have a usable, if unstable, OS X system.

The nVidia SATA still gives me trouble- sometimes my NTFS and FAT32 partitions are recognized, sometimes not. If I delete the Extensions.kextcache and Extensions.mkext files and reboot, the SATA partitions are seen until the next boot. Guess I'll have to check another forum thread...

I also have a strange latency problem- I can be scrolling through a file list or maybe hitting a bunch of backspaces on the terminal command line and the computer sort of stops a second or two and then resumes. Any ideas?

[wkweksl]

John, you might want to try a PATA drive instead while waiting for the NF SATA support to mature.

[planetbeing]

Could someone tell me the PHY address they're using now?

[johnzbesko]

# cat /var/log/system.log|grep PHY
Mar 26 12:41:42 john-zbeskos-computer kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x04c0:0x0013 at address 1.
Mar 26 12:53:32 localhost kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x04c0:0x0013 at address 1.
Mar 26 13:55:25 localhost kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x04c0:0x0013 at address 1.
Mar 26 13:58:14 john-zbeskos-computer kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x04c0:0x0013 at address 1.
Mar 26 14:36:33 localhost kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x04c0:0x0013 at address 1.
Mar 26 14:42:03 localhost kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x04c0:0x002f at address 1.
Mar 27 14:26:38 localhost kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x04c0:0x002f at address 1.
Mar 27 14:31:13 localhost kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x04c0:0x000f at address 1.
Mar 27 16:34:37 localhost kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x04c0:0x000f at address 1.
Mar 27 16:40:44 localhost kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x04c0:0x002f at address 1.
Mar 28 13:25:21 localhost kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x04c0:0x002f at address 1.
Mar 28 13:57:06 john-zbeskos-computer kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x03c0:0x0031 at address 1.
Mar 28 20:03:24 localhost kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x03c0:0x0031 at address 1.
Mar 28 22:24:10 localhost kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x03c0:0x0031 at address 1.
Mar 28 22:34:04 localhost kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x03c0:0x0031 at address 1.

Hope this helps! The first entries obviously refer to the use of the earlier versions of forcedeth.kext

BTW, I am using a PATA drive. When I discovered that nVidia SATA didn't work (with the tiger vmware image), I added an old 8GB drive, partitioned with 6GB HFS and 2GB FAT32 volumes. Maybe this old funky drive is the cause of my latency problem. Also, my keyboard and mouse occasionally go dead and I have no choice but to physically reboot. Maybe support for PS/2 connections is also buggy? Do the Mac 86 machines use USB keyboards and mice?

[npwski]

Finally, forcedeth works for me perfectly, no garbage in logs. Great work, thank you very much!

Mar 28 11:35:00 Gemastud kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x04c0:0x000f at address 1.
Mar 29 07:46:58 Gemastud kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x04c0:0x0000 at address 1.
Mar 29 07:57:31 Gemastud kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x03c0:0x0031 at address 1.
Mar 29 08:13:20 localhost kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x03c0:0x0031 at address 1

[wkweksl]

planetbeing, on Mar 29 2006, 12:09 PM, said:

Could someone tell me the PHY address they're using now?

Mine is at address 1 as well.

[planetbeing]

theSpam, on Mar 28 2006, 03:53 PM, said:

Great work!

Now I regret spending $9 on a seperate NIC 2 weeks ago

I should have decided to code this a long time ago. If everyone paid me half the amount they spent for cheap NICs....

For those who are interested, I've isolated the problem the earlier version was having, but the latest update essentially fixes it anyway, so there won't be a new release. Please continue to report bugs here.

[borez]

planetbeing, on Mar 29 2006, 01:00 AM, said:

@borez: Glad you have it working! The default kext you're using right now supports all the features I've implemented so far, which includes offload checksumming, memory scatter/gather, and a IRQ polling system that should be easier on your CPU in general, so it's really the best version to use if you can.

Would you mind digging in your /var/log/system.log and telling me what PHY the driver is using? It'll be a line like:

forcedeth: Found PHY 0x3080:0x000c at address 9.

If you have two lines like that in a row, maybe one at address 1 and one at address 9, paste me both of them. This would be immensely helpful because in the future I can make the driver pick a PHY more intelligently (instead of just picking the last one detected, as I am doing currently).

Hi there,

This is what I got. There's only 1 line here.

Mar 29 15:25:22 localhost kernel[0]: forcedeth: Found PHY 0x03c0:0x0031 at address 1.
I do sometimes get some system lockups, but there doesn't seem to be anything logged in the system.log.
Hope they don't happen again..

[wkweksl]

@planetbeing

How do you stop the driver from spamming system.log with the following message? I'm still getting quite a bit of it. Thanks.
Mar 28 02:00:22 Gemastud kernel[0]: forcedeth: packet 80000000 - 8000062e
Mar 28 02:00:22 Gemastud kernel[0]: forcedeth: packet 80000000 - 8000062e

[planetbeing]

If you don't want the debugging messages, don't use the debugging versions. In the release folder, try forcedeth.kext first and if that doesn't work, forcedeth-nock.kext

[wkweksl]

Is anyone experiencing system lockups over large file transfers? I've had it on 2 occasions transferring files in excess of 10MB.

[snip3r]

Encountered once when the other PC in my room access the router at the same time

[borez]

Me too, it happened when I was just surfing the web.

[snip3r]

how to i load forcedeth.kext automatically each time the OS is launched? Thanks

[planetbeing]

I've put up a new version of the driver in the OP that demonstrates better stability than the previous version. The large downloads problem should be solved, but this fix may generate new stability issues, but I haven't run into them yet. Tested with a few gigabytes worth of transfers over my LAN.

[Thor]

Hi and thank's planetbeing for this driver. I have some questions if somone have time.

On my Gigabyte mombo are 2 network cards, according to Gigabyte data it looks like that:


----------------------------------
Dual LAN solution with Gigabit LAN solution integrated

# Marvell 8001 Gigabit Ethernet controller
# ICS 1883 LAN PHY
-----------------------------------

Will this driver possibly work with on or the other.

If I try do I paste the driver intoo IONetworkFamily.kext ?


Thanks.

[sambo60]

This looks very good but can someone post a clear instruction manual for this? (Very clear for n00bs)I don't know which files to use and what to do.

[karlac]

edit: Great job now I can play WoW on the mac side :vader breathing:

[wkweksl]

Ok. Here's a quick howto

1. Get the forcedeth driver
2. Expand the zip file onto the desktop. You should see a forcedeth folder
3. Open terminal
4. In terminal, type in "sudo -s", key in your password
5. Type "chown -R root:wheel ~/Desktop/forcedeth/build/Release/forcedeth.kext"
6. Type "chmod -R 755 ~/Desktop/forcedeth/build/Release/forcedeth.kext"
7. Type "kextload -v ~/Desktop/forcedeth/build/Release/forcedeth.kext"

The LAN should be up at this stage. You can check either through the network utility or via terminal by "ifconfig -a". Do a ping to your router to verify the connection is ok. If you need to unload the driver, do a "kextunload ~/Desktop/forcedeth/build/Release/forcedeth.kext".

Once you are happy with the performance, you can move it into the main extensions folder and kextload it automatically by adding this line to the top of the /etc/rc file using the nano editor.

"kextload /System/Library/Extensions/forcedeth.kext"

Thanks to planetbeing for writing this driver.