Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2001 17:49:11 -0600 From: "Michael C . Wu" <keichii@iteration.net> To: "E.B. Dreger" <eddy+public+spam@noc.everquick.net> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The ideal NIC (Re: if_fxp - the real point) Message-ID: <20010309174911.D24830@peorth.iteration.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0103092254240.10515-100000@www.everquick.net>; from eddy%2Bpublic%2Bspam@noc.everquick.net on Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 11:03:33PM %2B0000 References: <20010309221250.2384337B71B@hub.freebsd.org> <Pine.LNX.4.20.0103092254240.10515-100000@www.everquick.net>
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On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 11:03:33PM +0000, E.B. Dreger scribbled: | Bear with me and allow me my delusions while I daydream... | | What with FPGA technology as reasonable as it is, and the amount of hw/sw | talent on these lists, maybe people should band together and come up with | a NIC? Maybe have native mode + Tulip/PNIC clone compatibility mode. Altera and Xilinx do not sell these things in small quantities. And you probably need a high gate count FPGA anyway. (read: expensive) | Take a look at www.opencores.org for a start. I highly doubt their feasibility. The number one problem being the development tools required are not "given out" for free. Do ou have any idea how much work it is to write a complete VHDL/Verilog library? :) Even if you do finish writing one, who is going to test it? You will also note that OpenCore does not have a list of their developers. (I wonder if they have more than 5 master-level VLSI design engineers.) The reason against your idea is the same reason that people do not run Linux on Sun Enterprise 10000's. At that cost level, we want it to just *work*. Then again, who wants to GPL their chips? | What production volumes are required before ASICs are feasible? What The smallest feasible industrial volumes that I have seen are greater than 10000 chips. | about having a FreeBSD CDROM + NIC bundle featuring whatever card gets | designed? | | If ya can't join 'em, beat 'em. I think surrendering ourselves to Big Industries in this case is a smart move. | Okay. Back to work and reality. :-) -- +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | keichii@iteration.net | keichii@freebsd.org | | http://iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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