Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 09:04:46 -0500 (EST) From: Doug Hass <dhass@imagestream.com> To: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Cc: Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org>, Jim Bryant <kc5vdj@yahoo.com>, MurrayTaylor <taylorm@bytecraft.au.com>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: FYI Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.96.1011017085406.14720A-100000@ims1.imagestream.com> In-Reply-To: <000901c156cd$19a654a0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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> Is there any way to get some of this - NOT under GPL and NOT under NDA? > There's at least one person during this thread who was looking for a > DS-3 card like a WANic 8xx You _did_ mention that some of the card modules > in SAND are not under NDA? All of the code is licensed under either the LGPL or is available only under NDA. Neither of these should present a problem for developers who want to write FreeBSD drivers (whether they are based on the LGPL'ed SAND or are monolithic). > We might be easier getting 10 buyers for DS3 cards than 100 buyers for > WANic 4xx cards, if you get my drift. Well, if people don't mind buying cards with no drivers...The reason for offering the 400 series at a discount was to solve the supply issue that you raised originally. > Doug, as a FYI, I believe that I can fill in a bit on the state of the sr > driver. They don't actually refer to the cards as the n2pci (now, at least) > They have had work done to them already by John Hay and Julian. I'm glad to hear that the name was corrected. If someone is interested, there is a newer development kit (actually several newer ones) that would improve that driver significantly, especially in high load situations. I'm certain that those improvements are not in the driver, since the development kit containing them is only available under license. > This support does NOT appear in the FreeBSD driver. It's not possible to use > port1 (the one with the CSU port) in a FreeBSD system at this time. It may be > that John Hay chopped out this support but more likely he was working with > an older version of the driver. There's no reason that you can't use the N2csu port in a FreeBSD system. The code to do this has been freely available for nearly 6 years. We released a version of the n2 code to open source as well. > The second bug only appears on WANic 405's and is triggered by high > volume rates on both interfaces simultaneously. Rod has been unable to > isolate the problem but he and I confirmed that it only appears with > dual-port cards. The bug causes about 10% packet loss to be noted on a > Pentium 200. I believe that it is possible to minimize the effects of > this bug by using the cards in a much faster CPU. Actually, it will happen with the one-port cards, too. As you increase the CPU or the clock rate, the problem gets worse. We've fixed this (among other things), which is why I recommended getting ahold of the newer DDK. > Other than that the FreeBSD sr driver is stable, has not caused a crash > or other problem on the hardware I've used it on over the last year and > a half, on a busy Internet router that runs BGP. Great! That's what I like to hear. The hardware is quite reliable and well-proven, and I'm glad your drivers are working well. > Well, we _had_ a solution - the 400/405 that worked well, and has a > Netgraph-enabled driver for it. I guess that nobody let you guys know > at Imagestream that developers in the FreeBSD community were maintaining > the "old" BSDI driver. Sigh. We knew that the driver had undergone some maintainence. It still has bugs, and doesn't take advantage of the later code advances in the development kit, but if it works well enough for you, then that's not an issue. If you don't want to improve the driver beyond where it is now, that's definitely up to you. You know that improvements and bug fixes exist if you ever decide they are affect your use of the card enough to put them in place. > What we don't have is a solution for the 5xx and later cards. But I think > that there would be even more interest on a DS3 card like the WANic 8xx Development tools for the later cards have been freely available (under NDA) for 5 years now. No one is holding anyone in the FreeBSD community back. Doug To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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