I have the AsRock 7kvm2 motherboard with onboard lan. It gets autodetected by KnoppMyth without a problem. However, it appears to not be running in full duplex mode. Basically the problem is that any network traffic crawls along at a snails pace. From the MythWeb pages to trying to copy movies off of it with scp or winscp. When I run dmesg I see the following:

root@mythtv:~ # dmesg | grep eth
eth0: VIA VT6102 Rhine-II at 0xdffffe00, 00:0b:6a:12:33:3c, IRQ 11.
eth0: MII PHY found at address 1, status 0x786d advertising 05e1 Link 45e1.
eth0: MII PHY found at address 2, status 0xf000 advertising 0000 Link f000.
eth0: MII PHY found at address 3, status 0xf000 advertising 0000 Link f000.
eth0: MII PHY found at address 4, status 0xf000 advertising 0000 Link f000.

I've found some documentation on adding options to the modules.conf file to force it to use full duplex mode but there doesn't seem to be an entry in modules.conf for it. Any idea on how I can force it to use full duplex? Any idea on how it is being setup now so I can change it? Would a new driver help it out?

Thanks

you can do

and that output should tell you what module its using.
then you would add a line like

options modulename something=argument

note that this line should go in a file in /etc/modutils or it will get overwritten. also you will need to run update-modules after you add it.

I just ran that and nothing was returned. I tried something similar before I posted which is when I noticed that there wasn't anything in modules.conf that referenced eth0. I think that means that the drivers are not being loaded as a module and they are compiled in to the kernel... I think.

If that is the case can I make them a module so that I can add some options to it?

wow that is truely odd.
try running
ifconfig and make sure you have lo and one other interface. this other interface is usually eth0, but could be eth1 or wlan0(wireless) then grep for that interface name. I don't think this kernel is too customized from the debian kernels and they don't compile any network drivers directly into the kernel they are all modules.

Here is the result of ifconfig


root@mythtv:/myth/video # ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0B:6A:12:33:3C
inet addr:192.168.0.100 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:47280 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:8665 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:19711634 (18.7 MiB) TX bytes:3910751 (3.7 MiB)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0x5f00

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:294 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:294 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:411938 (402.2 KiB) TX bytes:411938 (402.2 KiB)

So it obviously is getting an IP address. Do you think it would improve things if I put an entry in modules.conf? Does the KnoppMyth kernel come with the Rhine II drivers?

I have done some googling and it appears that this problem is very common among users of this network card. Many people are complaining about slow upload speeds while still having fast downloads.

Some people are suggesting that this can be fixed with the noapic option. the thing is that I don't know how to disable apic in KnoppMyth. Anybody know how to do that?

you can put a line in your lilo.conf file in the append = "" section. I forget the exact syntax so you will have to google for that but it is someting like boot=noapic. just google for noapic, or you could just turn of apic in the bios.

I googled for it as well as searched the archives for this forum. I found about four different ways to indicate noapic. I tried them all and it didn't seem to fix the problem so I guess I'll just go out and buy a new NIC. Several of the posts that I found on the web say that newer kernels have fixed the problem so I'll just try it again with the new KnoppMyth comes out. Granted that is if the next KnoppMyth has a different kernel.

Thanks for all your help. I appreciate it.

well it could well be that they need nolapic which doesn't work in 2.4 kenels. noapic and nolapic are different.