Since the release of my unofficial patch for the sk98lin module, I've received several e-mails from SN95 owners who reported me their stories. The last two days I got two e-mails giving me more clues about the possible causes for the “VPD” problem.

The first clue came from “Eric Hill Matlis”, who reported me that you apparently could fix the VPD-data of your SN95 with a patch submitted by ASUS! Unfortunately, this patch is only released as a DOS executable, which leads to a dead end. If you really want to play with this patch, you can download it at this location. Please note that this patch is originally not intended for the SN95 mainboard, so nor I, nor Eric, can be held responsible for any damage this patch could cause!

Another lead, came today from “Morten Johannes Ervik”, who forwarded me an e-mail from SysKonnect's technical support. They wrote that if the VPD data is not available (or not complete, I assume) the sk98lin driver will fail to load.

By combining both e-mails I can deduct that it seems that Shuttle has “forgot” to program (some?) data in the VPD section of the ethernet hardware. The patch from ASUS seems to overwrite this section with correct data, using a binary blob included in the patch above. Perhaps, when I've got some spare time, I could make a dump of the VPD section of my SN95 board and see if I can find any (large) differences. Unfortunately, my spare time is very scarse at the moment, so I cannot promise you anything on short notice...