Kinda upset at the lack of response to GBe issues

[pfeerick]

I'm still studying the data sheet more to find out what kinds of things might affect whether it would autoneg too much, or not autoneg, or ... basically, how does that particular chip work vs how might it work with one of the mods listed in the schematic. It is a complex schematic, and a very complex chip (inexpensive as it is... you can get the chip for $2.25).

Of course it does not help that we don't have an up-to-date schematic. I was hoping against hope that my Pine boards might have a one-off chip... but no... I still have to remove the board from my play box, but so far my boards are all 'Green' chips  RTL8211E

From what I can tell so far, it will either autoneg or not auto-neg... there's not much more to it. Most of the rest of the information is just telling you the sequence it does things in, and what is shoved into what register. 

On page 16, it tells you what the AN[0] and AN[1] pins need to be set to in order to enable autonegotiation, or manually set the speed/duplexing. Since pull-high or pull-lower resistors are used, it seems that both AN[0] and AN[1] should be pulled high (11). Which if I'm reading p18 of the pine64 schematic right, should be the case. What I can't tell is if the config registers can override this, as there is a specific 'restart auto-negotiation (register 0.9)' register, which if it can override the config pins (which I doubt), could still enable auto-negotation.

Whilst this a somewhat comprehensive datasheet at times, it can still be pretty crappy (no wonder they hide it behind a NDA screen... hope pine64 don't get in trouble for releasing that into the wild!) Oh how I wish it were one of the Atmel datasheets... 234 pages of overkill for a 8 pin chip!!!! : Or, not to be outdone... Microchip have a mere 397 treekiller for a 8 pin chip!