Ethernet daughter board.

[Cospan]

First I would like to say thanks to Tarun for the support that I
received in trying to develop my daughter board, which is more or less
a copy of Virtual Cog's design. It is alive... sort of.

I got the board fabricated and assembled. Unfortunately I couldn't
find the crystal that was used on VCOG's board, so I had a struggle
until I finally ended up with an oscillator.


Now for some questions

As of now when the Linux kernel boots up it recognizes Eth0, I can
ping myself (127.0.0.1), but I don't think it is talking over the
network so I believe I have some hardware debugging to go, but I don't
know if its there is some software settings that can be changed, For
example I know that the LEDs on the board should be attached to link,
100/10, and data but right now when Linux boots up, they just are on
permanently (if Linux is not on then the lights are off).

Hardware and a little bit of firmware is my realm, and I have started
to read "Linux Device Driver" from the online books and manuals in the
wiki but I am not feeling very confident about developing a device
driver for the Ethernet board.

Is the Ethernet chip pre-configured at VCOG, or is the configuration
completely volatile, and must be programmed every time its plugged in?

Does the driver for the Ethernet board set up all the registers within
the VCOG Ethernet board?

Is there a device driver template that I can start out with?

one more question, and this is off topic. I'm going to make a USB
board, and have been pouring over the datasheets for the processor,
but I have one concern. Does the processor have the entire USB
physical transceiver build in, or is it really an interface that
requires an external USB transiever. I was looking for some app-note,
or addendum within the processors datasheet that went into more detail
about it, but there is very little information about the USB host
functionality, and since I have little experience working with USB I
am not sure if it is a normal practice to put the entire physical
transceiver in the processor.

Basically I want to know if I can attach the USB transceiver from the
processor directly into a USB hub IC on another board, and have four
external ports.

Thank you again for all your support so far.