Well I seem to have stirred up a whole load of stuff.
I'd say the most interesting points are:
1) Many people don't like the idea of another ISA card
due to interrupt problems, and fewer mainboards with ISA.
While I sympathise, I feel the a PCI based card would
be too difficult for most people to knock up in the shack.
As for SCC ICs, DMA etc, someone came up with the idea
that Microchip PIC series can to Sync serial and could
just talk to dual port shared memory and forget SCCs and
DMA, a memcpy is probably better.
2) USB. Interesting but has a whole heap of nasties.
What would be nice is that one could be used for your
average end user, a multihomed 'home' station could
hub a few of them to a PC.
But what really stands out is that a hub of them
could be connected to an 'embedded router' allowing
routers to be put on remote sites where a PC might
not stand the harsh environment.
3) Ethernet. Well, we might as well formally issue
an RFC on putting callsigns in 802 MAC addresses
and scrap AX.25 :-)
The main problem with Ethernet ICs is timers as most
of them are in silicon and can't be tweaked.
J
As for the BPQ ether driver, I think I can claim to
have kicked that off, although at the time I had
very litle knowledge of the kernel networking. I spent
quite a few hours peering over Steve GW7RRM's shoulder
at college, him coding, me advising :-) Then I think
he gave up and we handed the code over to Johnathen.
