Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2001 21:48:50 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Bill Paul <wpaul@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@kdm.org>, jlemon@flugsvamp.com, the_srinivas@hotmail.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: TCP&IP cksum offload on FreeBSD 4.2 Message-ID: <3BB6A432.FF49BAC3@mindspring.com> References: <20010930000258.B7EEF37B403@hub.freebsd.org>
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Bill Paul wrote: > It is possible for a driver > to load a custom image into the NIC's memory which will override the > auto-loaded one, and it's also possible to load a new image into > the EEPROM, however this requires an additional manual on top of > the BCM5700 driver developer's guide as well as the firmware development > kit, which you can only get from Broadcom/3Com/whatever under NDA. Yes. This is annoying as hell. One wonder what they are thinking. > These custom images are called "value-add" firmware which are used to > provide features like TCP segmentation, which you can't do with the > default firmware image. Note that the BCM5700/Tigon III only has > a limited amount of on-board RAM (256KB, I think). You're supposed > to be able to attach up to 16MB of static SRAM to the BCM5700. The > BCM5701 doesn't support external SSRAM at all, which I find a little > confusing. The hardware based two card failover is based partly on card firmware changes, as well. They support this for Linux because they themselves wrote the code. They won't let third parties license this for porting, unfortunately, even for binary only ditributions. 8-(. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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