[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Garrett D'Amore wrote:
Masayuki Murayama wrote:
...
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.
Actually, dnet is really, really crufty. I wouldn't mind just
wholesale replacing it with another driver. (Your "tu" might be a
suitable replacement.... However, I'd prefer not to have "tu" replace
some of the other drivers that are out there .... my own afe and mxfe
drivers, and the dmfe driver are examples.)
The funny thing is that real 21143's have not been sold for many many
years now. I sort of just hope that we can just let the driver die a
quiet death. But those few quad-port 21143 cards are the one
problematic part.
If I come across *real* 21143's I try to remember that they are
such and keep them for alpha based pc's (Tru64 is *very* picky
about which ones do or do not work with its tulip driver) :-)
There are a lot of tulip clones out there that seem "broken",
in one way or another.
Yes, there are. So much that I long ago gave up trying to sustain one
driver with support for all the variants. Hence my separate afe and
mxfe drivers.
One of the most broken variants is the old Lite-On PNIC (LC82C168 and
LC82C169.) These have such a bad bug, that you have to do introspection
on the contents of each packet to make sure that you've properly
identified the end of a received packet. I had a driver that I started
to work with these, but I abandoned the effort about 5 years ago; there
was no point in it since they are incredibly rare these days.
The only two companies still actively making tulip clones that I'm aware
of are Infineon (formerly ADMtek, supported by my "afe" driver) and
Davicom ("dmfe"). (And Davicom's parts are no longer used on any add-in
cards... but you find them on AMD Geode systems sometimes.)
The other variants all long since died.
There are a few companies also using a tulip-workalike in certain
embedded scenarios... for example Atheros uses a tulip work-alike in
their WiFi "SoC" (system-on-a-chip), which is a MIPS core with a WLAN
mac controller and ethernet controller. Not an interesting market for
Solaris, certainly.
-- Garrett
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