On 09/15/10 08:31, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 17:10 +0200, dpecka wrote:
well, i'm not expert in any case for such a thing, but i'd like to
suppose, that the emulated driver attempts to be identical as a hardware
however it doesn't in real ..
Actually, usually the emulation doesn't emulate the full hardware, just
enough to make the typical OS drivers work with it. In some cases, the
behaviors are very fragile, depending on specific initialization
sequences, such that when the driver does them differently (perhaps on a
different OS), the emulation fails to work.
And the e1000g driver is from Intel, at least originally. Some tweaks might have been done from
the original code drop, as I know it was made to work on SPARC at one point, but any such
changes would have gone back to Intel.
We have had issues in the past where drivers failed on Solaris that worked elsewhere. One that
had Intel scratching their heads was for the Pro-100/B NICs. A specific revision would stop
working after a while under heavy load. It was eventually chased down to a firmware issue that
was only seen on Solaris, because we were actually getting more throughput that Linux or Windows
at the time. The driver now recognizes those revision devices and uploads a firmware fix to
them. But it took Intel almost a year to figure out what was going on.
Just an example of how a driver might act differently on Solaris versus other
OSes.
Mike
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