It looks like dmfe is not part of OpenSolaris, but is only available for SPARC systems. Is there a reason for this? The chip is a commodity chip that is readily available on PCs, and indeed, it would be nice to have a common driver for it.
Davicom parts are basically another tulip clone variant, and so I can't imagine there is any compelling reason to keep the sources for dmfe closed. It would be nice to have this available in OpenSolaris. If push came to shove, I could probably write a dmfe driver trivially by modifying my own afe/mxfe drivers (Davicom chips are pretty "clean" tulip clones), and make that public. It is also supported, IIUC, by Masayuki's "tu" driver. Frankly, I am not really fond of the fact that there are multiple drivers supporting the same chip, which is the _main_ reason I've never bothered to write my own dmfe driver. FWIW, I have a driver for PNIC chips (another tulip clone) as well, that is about 85% working right now, but I sort of lost interest because you can't really find those chips on the market anymore. Here's more or less a brief overview of what drivers for tulip chips exist: dnet: in Solaris, but only built for x86 by default (why?). Only supports actual DEC tulips. This code is really stale the last time I looked. dmfe: in Solaris (closed source), SPARC only. Only supports Davicom parts. Code has gotten some maintenance. afe/mxfe: My unbundled open source (SPARC/x86). Fully DDI and DR/suspend compliant. Supports ADMtek, Macronix, and PNIC2 chips only. (These are the most common tulip variants found today, especially in cardbus 10/100 cards where the admtek centaur is the main contender.) tu: Masayuki's rewrite/port from Linux, supports pretty much all tulip clones, but probably lacks some features (DDI suspend safety, ndd tunables, etc.) Because of all the various bugs/quirks in odd tulip clones, the driver is quite a bit more complicated than it otherwise might be. Personally, I prefer my approach of providing the best possible Solaris support for a few of the most common chips to Masayuki's approach of providing more basic support for all the variants under the sun, but of course my opinion is probably not 100% objective. :-) If Sun wants to incorporate mxfe/afe into OpenSolaris, I'd be happy to update them to nemo and make them support VLAN and Jumbo frames. The hardware can certainly do it. I don't want to update them _before_ that point, though, because then I'd have to maintain two different versions, one for nemo and one for GLDv2. -- Garrett D'Amore, Principal Software Engineer Tadpole Computer / Computing Technologies Division, General Dynamics C4 Systems http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/ Phone: 951 325-2134 Fax: 951 325-2191
