Via Rhine-II on-board : osx86 and linux

[hdas]

Hi. First of all, many thanks to the osx86 project, that I have osx (kalyway 10.5.2) working fine on my 2-year old desktop with Athlon 64x2 3800+ on ECS K8T890A motherboard with VIA chipset and Nvidia GeForce 7300GS PCI-E graphics card. Everything works! Now here is the issue. I have a dual boot with linux. I noticed that after installing the driver extension module ViaRhine.kext for my on-board Via Rhine II network card, the network card is dead-slow in linux (like 50KB/s download speeds in contrast to usual 10MB/s). After looking at the system logs in linux, it seems that the MII (see wikipedia) is no longer functional. 'mii-tool' in linux doesn't detect any interfaces. The only workaround I have figured out so far is to run 'mii-tool -R' in linux to reset the mii. mii-tool still doesn't detect any interfaces, but the network card returns to its usual speed. Hope it helps anyone else running into same issue. I also hope to (not be lazy and) contact the driver developer or someone else to see the way the ViaRhine.kext (or linux) driver initializes or stops the device.