I just got information from a close friend and I can happily confirm that the onboard SunGem ethernet works on PMAC 3.1 with MorphOS 3.6 due to the recent broadcom chipset driver.

I went to morphos-team website and I saw that that they have removed also the previously mentioned incompatibility with the particular system.

However, this update to the compatibility list went unoticited with the latest MoprhOS release news and I wanted people to know about it :)

> the onboard SunGem ethernet works on PMAC 3.1 with MorphOS 3.6 due to the
> recent broadcom chipset driver.

I don't understand. What does the BCM43 driver have to do with the SunGEM chipset?

> I went to morphos-team website and I saw that that they have removed also the
> previously mentioned incompatibility with the particular system.

What have they removed? It still reads:

"On-board 10/100/1000MBit Ethernet on Power Mac G4 (excluding early PowerMac3,1)"
http://www.morphos-team.net/hardware

> this update to the compatibility list went unoticited with the latest MoprhOS release news

I think there was no update to the compatibility list in this regard.

I thought the SunGem was the manufacturer utlizing the broadcom chipset. Perhpas I was wrong? Even still. I can assure you that the onboard ethernet on the PMAC 3.1 works (heck, I connected to the internet through that :))

Sun GEM is actually made by Sun Microsystems of Sparc, Solaris and Java fame, now owned by Oracle. I believe the GEM part stands for 'Gigabit Ethernet Module', which of course is a bit of a misnomer when talking about f.ex. the Mac Mini.

It is pretty common to have Ethernet chips split up into two parts: One part handling the Ethernet side of things (making sense of the incoming data) and one part handling the physical side of things (called a 'physical transceiver').

Whether or not it is literal Sun chips that are used in Macs, or simply a chip based on their design, I do not know. However, the hardware is indeed compatible with Sun's chips, so that's why the driver is named as it is.

Some Macs actually do use Broadcom chips for the physical transceiver part of things, however this is completely unrelated to the Broadcom wireless driver that appeared in MorphOS 3.6.

The MorphOS Sun GEM driver wasn't updated between MorphOS 3.4 and MorphOS 3.6, thus if your built-in network works now but didn't in MorphOS 3.4, it's a side effect from something else and not because driver support specifically for that machine was introduced in MorphOS 3.6.

> I thought the SunGem was the manufacturer utlizing the broadcom chipset.

The Broadcom chipset is from Broadcom, actually. The manufacturer who utilized the Broadcom chipset (and the SunGEM chipset) on its boards is Apple, actually ;-)

> I can assure you that the onboard ethernet on the PMAC 3.1 works

I believe that. I just say that contrary to your claim the compatibility list on the MorphOS website has not been updated in this regard.

i have a powermac 3,1 the ethernet works fine and i have morphos 3.5.1

hi