
E-2
Am79C965A
Implication:
There is no jeopardy to customers using AMD drivers, because AMD OS drivers do not use ring lengths that long.
For customers developing proprietary drivers, implementation of the following work-around is highly recommended.
Work-around:
1. Program TLEN or RLEN to C hex if ring length of
256 is desired, or
2.
–
Initialize INIT block with any value for TLEN or
RLEN
–
Set INIT, don
’
t set STRT
–
After IDON, set STOP
–
Write to CSR76 (RCVRL) and CSR78 (XMTRL) with correct value
–
Set STRT
Status:
No current plan to revise silicon to fix this erratum.
2. Receive Frame Align feature not functioning correctly
Description:
The Receive Frame Align feature does not function correctly. The data field of a received frame will not necessarily
be forced to align to a double-word aligned address boundary when the RCVALGN bit (bit 0) in CSR122 is set. Two
extra bytes will not always be inserted at the beginning of the receive packet destination address field.
Implication:
Users are not able to force the data field of 802.3 frames to align to 0 MOD 4 address boundaries, i.e. double-word
aligned addresses, by setting this bit.
Work-around:
None. Do not activate this bit. This feature of the device does not function as described in the data sheet.
Status:
No current plan to revise silicon to fix this erratum.
3. False BABL errors generated
Description:
The PCnet-32 device will intermittently give BABL error indications when the network traffic has frames equal to or
greater than 1518 bytes.
Implication:
False BABL errors on the receiving station can be passed up to the upper layer software if the PCnet-32 device is
just coming out of a deferral and the multi-purpose counter used to count the number of bytes received reaches 1518
at the same time. If the network is heavily loaded with full-size frames, the probability of a false BABL error is high.
Work-around:
There are two possible work-arounds.
1. If the user has no intention to transmit frames larger than 1518 bytes, the BABL bit may be masked to ignore
babble errors. In this case, the false babble error will not cause an interrupt, nor will it be passed to the higher-
level software.
2. Check to see if the device is transmitting in ISR (Interrupt Service Routine), which is induced by the BABL error.
The BCRs that control the LED settings can be programmed to indicate a transmit activity, assuming the interrupt
latency is not longer than one minute IFG (Inter-Frame Gap) time.