Generally, +1. The old dnet code is really crufty, and a PITA to work with.
Actually, in retrospect (I didn't know this when I wrote the code), the Macronix devices are fairly faithful clones of the Digital tulip devices. Starting with my mxfe driver might not be a bad approach.
However, there are some tricky issues involved for dnet, which my mxfe driver doesn't deal with:
1) ROM parsing. Some NICs use a ROM to support alternative media. That said, its probably not unreasonable to ditch support for dnet devices that don't support either MII or NWay style 100Base-T/10Base-T. (I.e. I think BNC and AUI support could go bye-bye.)
2) interrupt hackery. It turns out that some multiport dnet cards exist that use non-compliant interrupt routing. This is something that would probably need to be maintained, since I believe that most folks still using dnet cards are doing so with multiport cards. (There is little need for the dnet driver otherwise.)
All that said, I'd just assume see dnet go bye-bye altogether. These devices are *really* ancient; I don't think a genuine tulip part has been sold in a *very* long time. Apart from the multiport variants, there is no good reason anyone should be still using these devices, IMO. There are cheap and readily available 10/100 and even gigabit alternatives.
-- Garrett Steven Stallion wrote:
All, I have been working with Garrett D'Amore over the last several months to add in GLDv3 support to the aging dnet driver. Unfortunately dnet is in pretty rough shape, and a number of inherent issues (particularly with PHY selection in the driver) is preventing clean results from NICDRV. Now that Brussels and Garrett's mii work have been putback, the driver is even more out of date. I spoke with Garrett briefly today, and had a thought: Rather than continue to prop up dnet and build on a shaky foundation, I would like to see the driver EOL'd and replaced by a clean-room implementation (the emancipation driver-gate seems a good candidate until the new code can be integrated into ON). Assuming community approval, I am stopping NICDRV testing of the patch for Bug ID 6687881, although it is still available: http://cr.opensolaris.org/~stallion/dnet/ Thoughts? Steve
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