> 7) enabling legacy: > > a) hme (and qfe) and certain modern variants of > iprb can do IP > hecksum offload, but it was never enabled by the > drivers. If someone > wants to take a crack at it after my GLDv3, its a > small driver task. A > good community project. Let me know . > > b) eri, ce, and gem can all do dynamic interrupt > blanking. So can > thers (iprb, and dmfe as well, I think.) We could > activate this in the > drivers. Again, not a big project. Let me know if > you want to help. > > c) We could also provide polling interfaces for > crossbow, when that > comes into Nevada. Only the gigE drivers are likely > to get attention > here. If you're interesting in helping out with > other legacy drivers, > let me know. > > d) multi-address support. Useful for VNICs and > crossbow. Again, > legacy NICs are likely not to get attention from > Sun... unless someone > else steps up to the plate. > > e) ndd/kstat cleanup. Brussels is going to do > some work here, but I > hink there is an opportunity for others to pitch in. > Some drivers need > dd tuning support for link, consistency changes, etc. > > f) more legacy driver conversions. E.g. dnet > could be updated to > LDv3, etc. There's a bunch of closed ones, too.
I recommend to make a new common layer for managing tx/rx buffers, tx/rx descriptor rings, and MII link. In my experience on writing various nic drivers, they were common. Actually I tried to make such a common layer, and it reduced the lines in hardware depend section. Typically it was 1500 - 2500 lines for a driver. > 8) Open sourcing. Cassini and a number of x86 nics > are currently > closed. I'd like to get this changed. I think some > of this was > deprioritized into the bit bucket, but conceivably a > few of them should > be doable without too much legal arm wrestling (iprb, > cassini -- Sun > owns all ce's IP, maybe others.) At some level, I > hope my GLDv3 efforts > will help because it means that the amount of > material that has to be > subject to a legal review will be much, much smaller. I think all device drivers must be opensource when opensolaris become *real* open source operating system. Closed source drivers will prevent opensoalris from porting it on another archetecture, including powerpc, mips. > 9) Porting. Some of the drivers are conceivably > useful on more than one > architecture, but are only enabled on that one. dmfe > is a good > example. dnet is another. (dnet would be very > useful on sparc, and > amd64 platforms, because there are some quad-port > cards that have real > 21143 tulip parts on them.) I think dnet must be enhanced for 21143 chipset. It doesn't work for my 21143 based network cards. According my experience on making 2114x driver, dnet doesn't seem to implement autonegotiation capability on 21143 SYN interfaces. -masa This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list [email protected]
