Date: Tue, 12 Sep 1995 17:26:28 -0800 From: shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green) To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Creating FreeBSD driver. How? Message-ID: <v02120d13ac7bda143dc8@[192.0.2.1]>
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At 13:35 9/12/95, Terry Lambert wrote: >ISO by itself is meaningless (means International Standards Organization) >as far as telling us what the card capabilities are. It's probably just >a manufacturer name. Isochronous Ethernet, short isoEthernet, (IEEE 802.9a) is a standard that allows the transmission of a regular 10Mbps Ethernet *and* 96 ISDN B-channels over the same existing 10baseT wiring, using a single network card. Delay within the extra B-channels stays constant regardless of load, up to their maximum 64kbps per channel. The Ethernet part of isoEthernet behaves just as a normal Ethernet, but whatever is going on in the Ethernet does not affect the ISDN channels in any way. Ideal for video conferencing, voice, and other real time services. My favorite demo of this technology is running a video conference over a couple of the ISDN channels and showing an Ethernet load monitor on the same screen. proving that no packets are moving over the Ethernet. Then I ftp a huge file from a RAM drive on an ftp server and there is no impact at all on the video qualitly. You got to see it to believe it. Very hot stuff. National Semi makes the chip sets (not yet for sale) and has produced some reference implementations of them, their Hydra cards (don't even bother trying to get some out of National), several of which are in my possession. >Since you say you've never done a driver before, you'll probably not have >sufficient information to do the ODI hack, which means it probably won't >get done. I now know that I need more info from National to create a driver for a new OS. They are very slow in providing it. We'll get it eventually. Once we do, I'll be back asking you folks for some more help on writing drivers :-) Meanwhile, I'll just use this spare $3000 (alpha, production version will be not much more expensive than today's Ethernet cards) card in its non-isochronous NE2000 compatible mode on my FreeBSD server. What a waste. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.
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