Netgear FA310TX & FA311 Fast Ethernet Adapters

The FA310TX and it's successor the FA311 are 10/100 Ethernet PCI cards from Netgear. There are a number of revisions of the both cards, but both the FA310 and the FA311 perform well and very reliable. The cards themselves are fairly inexpensive, offering excellant value for money, becuase of this they are a good proposition for building Linux based routers, and I have had no problems installing up to four FA311s in one machine!

The FA310TX is based on the DEC 21140 controller and may be described as Lite-On Comm. LNE100TX Fast Ethernet Adapter (this seems to stem from the chip being recognized as a Lite-On 82c168 PNIC). Known board revisions are C1, C2, C6, D1, D2 and D3. I have a XX revision card in my home machine and am very pleased with it.

  Ethernet controller: Lite-On Communications Inc LNE100TX
      Subsystem: Netgear FA310TX

      Class 0200: 11ad:0002 (rev 20) Subsystem: 1385:f004

The FA311...

Windows Support
Windows 98 supports the FA310TX card via the drivers supplied on the accompanying floppy. These work very well and I had no trouble with them at all during the years I ran Win98.

Windows ME supports the FA311 card via the drivers supplied on the accompanying CD-ROM. These worked flawlessly.

WinXP detects the FA310TX out of the box, so there are no problems installing or using the card under XP. I haven't tested the FA311 under XP, but either the driver database supplied with XP will detect the card and install the correct driver, or the drivers supplied on the floppy will work (whichever is the most up-to-date). Again I have had no problems using the card under XP.

Linux Support
Linux has supported these cards for quite some time. The FA310TX uses the Digital 21040 tulip driver and RedHat should detect this auto -magically. The supplied Linux driver is a modified version of tulip which overcomes a limitation of the version shipped with RedHat 5.2 when used with the 'D' revisions of the board. In later versions of RedHat (at the time of writing we are up to 8.0) these problems have long since been consigned to history, so the driver disk is redundant. The current tulip driver works absolutely fine, and there should be no need to start compiling anything.

    Linux Tulip driver version 0.9.15-pre11 (May 11, 2002)
    PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:0e.0
    tulip0:  MII transceiver #1 config 3000 status 7829 advertising 01e1.
    eth0: Lite-On 82c168 PNIC rev 32 at 0xe88aef00, X:X:X:X:X:X, IRQ 11.

The FA311 also works well with Linux.