Solaris on Tecra 550CDT: Network

I went with a proven 10 Mbit 10Base-T 3Com EtherLink III LAN PC Card, a.k.a. 3C589D-TP. Recently, 3Com discontinued this product and offered migration path to different models, 3CCE589DT and 3CCE589ET. Whether the new cards are going to be a totally seamless replacement for 3C589D in Solaris/x86 environment remains to be seen, but there was at least one report - from Tomas Tengling - that 3CCE589ET does work without problems. The correspondent driver that comes standard with Solaris 2.6 and 7 is pcelx. It works "right out of the box" and shouldn't give you any troubles. Two things are important to remember, however.

Before adding a PCMCIA network card - any one, not only 3C589D - to your system, please make sure that you've changed the Tecra's default setup for PCMCIA controller mode as described on Basic Installation page.

And don't wonder why Solaris doesn't recognize your PCMCIA network card during installation: the mini-kernel that runs at that time simply doesn't include support for PCMCIA. When you finish with installation and reboot the system from the hard drive, the "real" kernel comes into play, and the card will (or at least should) be seen, recognized, automatically (they're all PnP now, aren't they?) configured and available for use. No special configuration, like tweaking pcelx.conf file, should be needed; at least for 3C589D it isn't.

Just in case, here's how dmesg and prtconf report the working 3C589D card:

dmesg:

ISA-device: pcic0
pcic0 is /isa/pcic@1,3e0
Ethernet address = 0:10:4b:7b:f8:49
pcelx0 (@0x0): 3COM EtherLink III (PCMCIA):
	       ether (10baseT) 0:10:4b:7b:f8:49
pccard101,5890 at pcic@1,3e0 in socket 0
pccard101,5890 is /isa/pcic@1,3e0/network@0

network, instance #0
    Driver properties:
        name <chosen-interrupt> length <8>
            value <0x0100000000000000>.
        name <pm-hardware-state> length <24>
            value <0x70617265...>.
        name <model> length <55>
            value <0x33436f6d...>.
        name <device_type> length <8>
            value <0x6e6574776f726b00>.
        name <interrupts> length <4>
            value <0x01000000>.
        name <reg> length <36>
            value <0x00000024...>.
    Register Specifications:
        Bus Type=0x24000000, Address=0x0, Size=0
        Bus Type=0x24000000, Address=0x0, Size=2000
        Bus Type=0x21000000, Address=0x0, Size=10
    Interrupt Specifications:
        Interrupt Priority=0xb (ipl 11), vector=0x3 (3)

As you can see, on my system the network card is assigned IRQ 3 - this is why it's important to disable Tecra's built-in modem (as described on Basic Installation page): otherwise it would've consumed a precious IRQ although being totally useless under Solaris.