Earlier this week I got yet another request for qfe support for x86
systems. I get these requests fairly periodically. I guess there are a
lot of 4-port qfe cards still out there.
This last one finally gave me the impetus to do the work to do the
port. What I want to do is poll the community on this, because I'm
going to need help:
1) testing -- my last SPARC system with onboard hme died a while back
2) testing -- I have no sbus hme ports -- a Sun Ultra 2 or some
other system with sbus qfe or sunswift would be helpful here.
3) review -- as part of this effort I've removed all the legacy dvma
and on-demand DMA resource allocation, and replaced it with a very
simple "preallocated" DMA region/bcopy -- this is typical for most
simple 1G and slower ethernet NICs today. (This eliminated about 1000
lines from the driver.)
4) perf. testing -- the above changes "potentially" have performance
impact. I think on any supported CPU that these cards run on, the
simplifications will greatly outweigh the savings formerly afforded by
the "private" dvma interface this driver used to use
Now, the good news is that the entire effort here has only taken me a
few hours. But I figure if I can help out some of these folks with
those older qfe cards, its probably worth it. And the simplification in
the code, and getting one closer to elimination of the "private" dvma
interface is IMO a worthy goal.
I'd also like to convert this driver (and also eri and dmfe) to support
Brussels. If some enterprising community member wants to help out, let
me know.
-- Garrett
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