Date: Fri, 5 Sep 1997 10:11:11 -0500 (CDT) From: Mark Tinguely <tinguely@plains.NoDak.edu> To: freebsd-atm@freebsd.org Subject: Announcing IDT NICStAR device driver Message-ID: <199709051511.KAA20004@plains.NoDak.edu>
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Announcing the initial release of the IDT NICStAR device driver for FreeBSD-2.2.2-RELEASE. This device driver supports the 77201/77221 ATM SAR from Integrated Device Technology Inc. (http://www.idt.com/) as documented in the "IDT77201 NICStAR User Manual" (http://www.idt.com/), and separate Errata documents received from IDT. IDT also sells an evaluation board that consists of the SAR, the 128KB of SRAM (used for the various tables), and ATM media controller. The 77201/77221 is different than most other SARs, in that the sequencing and Re-assembly of the PDU from cells is done in host memory. The NICStAR is priced much less that other commercial ATM cards. Since more host memory is used than with traditional ARM cards, make sure you have plenty of RAM in your system. This driver was developed on a machine with 16 MB of RAM. I would suggest a machine using this driver have at least 32 MB of RAM. This driver was written and tested with a C3 version of the 77201. The 77221 is the E release of the SAR. Because of various errors in the 77201 SAR releases, I highly recommend the purchase of the 77221. If you are already own a 77201 (C3 or D), it is possible/likely the card can/will hang under conditions of receiving while also doing heavy transmission. Driver Features: 1) Quality of Service: The NICStAR support Constant Bit Rate, Variable Bit Rate*, Available Bit Rate*, and Unspecified Bit Rate QOS. The CBR is strongly enforced by the scheduling of the connection transmit times. The driver attempts to spread the transmit slots equally in time. The VBR, ABR, and UBR are supported in the card as prioritized transmission queues. The driver specifies the maximum transmission rate for each VC in the priority queue. The driver cannot guarantee the minimum ABR rate. 2) HARP support: This driver has network hooks to support the Host ATM Research Platform (HARP) classical IP over ATM written by the Advanced Networking Group at Network Computing Services, Inc (formerly the Minnesota Supercomputer Center, Inc.). For more information on HARP see: http://www.msci.magic.net/ This driver has been tested using HARP version 2.0 and 2.1. The HARP stack uses only UBR QOS of this driver. 3) Berkeley Packet Filter: This driver can send transmitted/received PDUs through Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) routines for ATM filtering/displaying. 4) Permanent MBUF: The NICStAR pre-loads receive buffers before receiving PDUs. To prevent a constant construction/destruction of a MBUF and its external buffer, I add a new flag in mbuf structure and a change the the MFREE macro. This change keeps the external buffer in a PERM MBUF. The FreeBSD NICStAR device driver maybe down-loaded from: ftp://ftp.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu/pub/freebsd/atm/nicstar.tgz Mark Tinguely tinguely@plains.NoDak.edu Computer Science http://www.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu/~tinguely/ 258 IACC (701) 231-7786 North Dakota State University Fargo, North Dakota 58105
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