On Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:34:16 -0700, "Garrett D'Amore" <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
Ahh, excellent. I'll make sure to nose around a bit. > 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.) Fortunately I've been able to find the PROM specification for the device, but you are absolutely right, there are a number of different PHY's supported. > 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.) I actually have one of these (its an older full-length Adaptec). I'll make sure to keep the interrupt hacks intact (cleaned up though - they still use the older interrupt function calls). > 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. I go back and forth on this all of the time - it is nice to keep legacy drivers around just for those users who use legacy hardware, but by the same token, at *some* point these devices need to be dropped. IMHO, I had always thought that the bus should be the limiting factor (i.e. once 32-bit PCI goes by the wayside, so should those drivers which rely on it). Just my 0.02. -- Yet magic and hierarchy arise from the same source, and this source has a null pointer. Reference the NULL within NULL, it is the gateway to all wizardry. _______________________________________________ driver-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/driver-discuss
