netgear FA311 use the "natsemi" driver, however, I cannot when a developement kernel, say, 2.5.62 is used and ACPI is on. Only when I pass the option "acpi=off" to the kernel, I can use the netgear FA311 card. I use a Athlon XP machine, Abit KX333 motherboard. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. On a PC with FA311 NIC card, load a development kernel 2.5.62 with ACPI support 2. try to "/etc/init.d/net.eth0 start", it will take a long time and failed at last 3. Actual Results: boot vanilla 2.4.20 kernel to use the netgear FA311 card to access the internet, even with ACPI support, no problem with this kernel. or boot the kernel 2.5.62 with "ACPI=off" to use the ethernet card. If I use "ck-sources-2.4.20-r3" kernel with APCI, I have same trouble with the netgear card. but if ACPI is off, no problem. ck-source kernel is a patched kernel with "Con Kolivas's high performance patchset". When some people with netgear FA311 card come to boot the gentoo 1.4_rc2 rescue CD, they cannot use the NIC card to access the internet. I guess this is due to "ACPI is on". Some other ethernet cards such as "3c905b" seems also do not work well if ACPI is on under certain kernel according to some threads at gentoo forum. I think this is a bug in ACPI.
Then when people compile their kernels for their final systems they should not use ACPI. The ACPI code is under heavy development, as it stabilizes issues like this will begin to go away, none of the gentoo developers however work on ACPI so we don't really have any way to fix this sort of issue other than keeping up to date with the ACPI code base as much as possible.
