From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Jul 9 06:56:47 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id GAA15536 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Thu, 9 Jul 1998 06:56:47 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from att.com (kcgw2.att.com [192.128.133.152]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id GAA15530 for ; Thu, 9 Jul 1998 06:56:46 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from sbabkin@dcn.att.com) From: sbabkin@dcn.att.com Received: by kcgw2.att.com; Thu Jul 9 08:37 CDT 1998 Received: from dcn71.dcn.att.com ([135.44.192.112]) by kcig2.att.att.com (AT&T/GW-1.0) with ESMTP id IAA09305 for ; Thu, 9 Jul 1998 08:56:39 -0500 (CDT) Received: by dcn71.dcn.att.com with Internet Mail Service (5.0.1458.49) id <32C9HSWZ>; Thu, 9 Jul 1998 09:56:38 -0400 Message-ID: To: mike@smith.net.au Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: NIC drivers Date: Thu, 9 Jul 1998 09:56:36 -0400 X-Priority: 3 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.0.1458.49) Content-Type: text/plain Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > -----Original Message----- > From: Mike Smith [SMTP:mike@smith.net.au] > > > >> Just curious, how do one find the neccesary info to write a > driver of > > >> say 3c509 fro FreeBSD? > > > You mean like, eg. /sys/i386/isa/if_ep.c? (The 3c509 driver.) > > > > Last I heard, the 509 driver was buggy. (According to LINT, it > still > > is.) When I last tried it about eight months ago, it was still > buggy. > > Cursory tests now (I've got one in this box, on the same LAN as an > > NE2000) indicate that it may still be broken. > > Yes; the driver is not spectacular, and neither is the card. > It worked fine for me in '95-'97 in my machine at work. Yes, it occasionally loses packets under high load but it's still faster than NE2000 (although I agree that the card is somewhat pathological). It can easily handle FTP at full Ethernet speed (1.1MB/s) in an old 486. Although I don't know about the current state of the driver. There was a period (early '95) when packet loss led to the hang of the card and that's the reason why it was marked as "buggy" in LINT at that time. This was fixed but this comment just was not cleaned up. There was the same problem somewhere in '96 when David Greenman had changed the way the watchdog routines are called for network drivers, but after this driver was changed according to the new way it worked again. -SB To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message