Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Usrp2 and Agere ET131x compatibility

[Matt Ettus]

OK, we got the driver to compile, and spent some time trying to get the 
card to talk to the USRP2.  If you try enough times, it sort of runs, 
but with a lot of noise.  It has the same behavior when running through 
an ethernet switch.  It turns out that the card and/or driver has some 
weird sort of data corruption which puts errors in nearly every received 
packet.  We also got a lot of syslog messages which were warnings from 
the driver.

When I tried to connect the card to my router and do normal TCP/IP over 
it, it can't even get an IP address from DHCP successfully.

Basically, I think that the kernel drivers are simply not working, so 
there's no hope of getting these cards to connect to a USRP2 properly if 
they can't connect to anything else either.  The fact that this driver 
has not been included in the main line kernel even though the chipset 
has been out for a long time (its no longer even owned by Agere -- it 
was bought by LSI) tells me that there are much deeper problems.

There are much better supported interfaces available.  If you are using 
a laptop with this chip in it, I would suggest buying an ExpressCard 
(next generation of PCMCIA) GigE card with a Marvell chip in it.  They 
should be less than $50.

Matt


address@hidden wrote:
> I downloaded it from here:
>
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/et131x
>
> I use dkms to auto compile; here is my dkms.conf:
> -----------------------------------------------------
> PACKAGE_NAME="et131x"
>
> BUILT_MODULE_NAME[0]="$PACKAGE_NAME"
> DEST_MODULE_LOCATION[0]="/kernel/3rdparty/$PACKAGE_NAME/"
>
> AUTOINSTALL=yes
> ----------------------------------------------------------
>
> Incidentally, a motherboard with the built-in Agere card seemed to work,
> but not the pciexpress card.
>
> eric
>
> ************************************
> Eric H. Matlis, Ph.D.
> Assistant Research Professor
> Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering Dept.
> 121 Hessert Center for Aerospace Research
> University of Notre Dame
> Notre Dame, IN 46556-5684
> Phone: (574) 631-6054
> Fax:   (574) 631-8355
>
> On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Matt Ettus wrote:
>
> > Yc Park wrote:
> > > Hi, guys
> > >
> > > I have two questions:
> > >
> > > - My laptop has AgereET131x chipset but it works perfect on Ubuntu8.10.
> > >   Then, wonder why I fail to find USRP2 by the 'find_usrps' command?
> > > (I see the chipset 'bad'
> > > here(http://gnuradio.org/trac/wiki/USRP2GigEReports), but it looks like
> > > that the linux and ET131 have some problems, not USRP2 and ET131)
> > >
> > > - Granted that the compatibility issue exists, do we have any progress
> > > on the latest source code of GR or on the USRP2 firmware?
> >
> >
> > I went out and bought a card based on this chipset so that I could
> > figure out the problem.  Unfortunately, I can't even get a driver
> > compiled for it, since the driver seems to not be in the mainline kernel.
> >
> > Matt
> >
> >
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