Usrp2 and Agere ET131x compatibility

GNU Radio
1

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’m eager to see it work with my laptop… usrp2 is just sitting on my
desk for more than a month T.T

Regards,
YCpark.

2

If you’re in a hurry to get it to work, your best bet is to go out and
buy a GigE express card. I doubt that much work is going into looking
into specific incompatible chipsets. I could be wrong.

Tim

Timothy R. Newman, Ph.D.
Wireless @ Virginia Tech
447 Durham Hall
Blacksburg, VA 24061
Phone: 540-231-2041

3

Yc Park wrote:

  • 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

4

I downloaded it from here:

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

5

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

6

Tha’s weired. Apparently Ubuntu 8.10 kernel includes Agere driver since
my laptop perfectly works ever since I installed Ubuntu 8.10.

But when I try the “fund_usrps” while monitoring the network packet,
nothing goes out though eth0 (Agere ET131).

Unfortunately, my laptop does only has a PCMCIA slot, and
my desktop does not have GigE, either.

Well, maybe I can buy a low cost GigE card with a PCI interface for the
laptop,
but the thing is that I’d like to work on my laptop…

Matt E. wrote:

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