GEI 82543 auto negotiation issue

Auto negotiation between two boards on my system (over copper GigE
interface with PRO1000_546_BOARD) have multiple issues.

1. Most of the time, it works. But as per MII debug it takes more than
100 tries.

2. Occasionally auto-negotiation fails. In that case, MII
initialization tries to force the link. But forcing never seems to
work. Either I get the "check cable connection" error or even without
the errors, the boards doesn't talk to each other.

So if auto-negotiation fails, I'm in for big trouble. Any pointers?

thanks,
arun

I had similar auto-negotiation problem on 82547 and may be applicable
to you. Bits 9:8 of CTRL_EXT are reserved and should be set to 01 not
00 as mentioned in previous Intel Yellow Document. This is now fixed in
latest Intel public document available at.
[url]http://developer.intel.com/design/network/manuals/8254x_GBe_SDM.htm[/url]

HTH,

Rajesh