[rescue] S-bus FDDI cards and NetBSD drivers, again.....

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, February 18, 2002 at 20:15:52 (-0500), Big Endian wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] S-bus FDDI cards and NetBSD drivers, again.....
>
> This has been rehashed several times.  The challenge to writting 
> drivers for the SBUS fddi boards is writing a complete SMT 
> implementation as there isn't any in hardware.

It's not that big a deal.  The ANSI spec isn't all that huge, and
there's already the SysKonnect SMT code for their linux PCI driver
(which isn't all that huge, though it's not all that simple either)
SysKonnect's SMT only supports version 7.2 of the spec while most
current devices seem to have marched on to 7.3.  I don't know if this is
anything important, or not.

[[ SysKonnect did not, BTW, publish a linux driver for their old SBus
card -- it's not supported any more at all it seems.  The linux driver
only supports the SK-55xx/SK-58xx adapters (SK-NET FDDI-FP/UP/LP). I
don't even know though if their SBus card used the same AMD Supernet III
chip set as the PCI/EISA cards do or not (their older ISA/EIAS/MCA cards
used the AMD FORMAC Plus). ]]

The only problem with SysKonnect's code, w.r.t. NetBSD, is that it's
copyright under the terms of the GPL, which would mean it would have to
be the last possible implementation usable in the world before it would
ever get close to being officially included in NetBSD (where new GPL'ed
code is almost strictly forbidden in the kernel!).

The SysKonnect linux driver is on first glance fairly well written (and
that's even though it's derived directly from the M$-NT driver!).

The more I think about it though the more I believe that FDDI SMT should
not ever be done in the driver -- that's something best done in firmware
on the card!  DEC did it right.....  ;-)

>  I belive the hardware 
> it self is relatively well documented and should be easy to write 
> drivers for.

Yeah, if the card has what I think it has on it then the chip docs are
available....

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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