Back during S10 Platinum Beta, I raised this RFE
http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4958870
to have bge(7D) support the Broadcom NetXtreme 5901 card which seems to be
popular in some laptops (like my IBM ThinkPad R40e :-). Having used
Broadcom's own bcme(7D) driver for a long time, I've recently tried bge(7D)
as of snv_33, and it seemed to just work initially, except for the expected
warnings:
Mar 17 20:13:03 llaima bge: [ID 801725 kern.warning] WARNING: bge0: Device
'pci14e4,170d' not recognized (5901?)
Mar 17 20:13:03 llaima bge: [ID 801725 kern.info] NOTICE: bge0:
ddi_intr_get_supported_types() returned: 1
Mar 17 20:13:03 llaima bge: [ID 801725 kern.info] NOTICE: bge0: bge_add_intrs:
interrupt type 0x1
Mar 17 20:13:03 llaima bge: [ID 801725 kern.info] NOTICE: bge0: Using FIXED
interrupt type
Mar 17 20:13:03 llaima mac: [ID 543131 kern.info] NOTICE: bge0/0 registered
Unfortunately, I'm just now using the driver for a large package and patch
installation (Studio 11, actually), and the link goes up and down
regularly, so there is obviously more work to do ;-( I initially had a
look at some BSD driver, and apart from mentioning the pci id, there seemed
to be no special support for it. I vaguely recall things were different
when I looked at Broadcom's sources to their Linux bcme driver, but I
cannot find those right now.
Anyway, in order to make this card fully supported, I'd like to know what
it would take to have a change for that integrated. As I see it, this
would primarily mean listing the card in bge-known-subsystems in
usr/src/uts/common/io/bge/bge.conf and handling the pci id in
usr/src/pkgdefs/SUNWbge/post{install, remove}, and of course investigating
and fixing the problems noticed above.
Apart from the actual code changes, what sort of testing would be required
to guarantee that the driver fully works for that card?
I hope this is the right list for such questions, but couldn't come up with
a better idea to ask those questions (maybe apart from the testing
community).
Rainer
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Rainer Orth, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University
