Date: Tue, 5 May 1998 01:05:51 -0400 (EDT) From: Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Call for testers for ThunderLAN ethernet driver Message-ID: <199805050505.BAA28835@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu>
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Recently I had a couple of Compaq machines with integrated ethernet controllers foisted on me, and was lucky enough to be able to install FreeBSD on one of them. Unfortunately, FreeBSD didn't support the Texas Instruments ThunderLAN (tm) ethernet chip in this machine, so I took it upon myself to write my own driver for it. After a whole two weeks worth of work, the driver is more or less complete (inasmuch as it works for me), and now I'd like to find some other people to test it before I slap it into the tree. I'm especially interested in testers for FreeBSD 3.0-current: I initially developed this driver for FreeBSD 2.2.6 and have only been able to test it there. I've made the necessary changes to make it compile on -current, but I can't trash this machine to install a -current snapshot to test it as it's now more or less in production. The driver supports about a half-dozen Compaq Netelligent adapters and Netflex integrated ethernet controllers. It also supports both the ThunderLAN embedded physical interface (PHY) and external PHYs such as the National Semiconductor DP83840A. It should also work with any other PHY that is MII-compliant. With the DP83840A (or equivalent) PHY, both 10Mbps and 100Mbps in half or full duplex are supported. The ThunderLAN's built-in PHY only supports 10Mbps. Modes can be set either manually or through autonegotiation. Although I have not tested it, it should also support some Texas Instruments ethernet adapters based on the ThunderLAN chip as well. The driver is available at the following places: ftp.ctr.columbia.edu:/pub/misc/freebsd/thunderlan.tar.gz ftp.freebsd.org:/pub/FreeBSD/incoming/thunderlan.tar.gz The distribution includes if_tl.c, if_tlreg.h and a README which explains how to build a kernel with ThunderLAN support. So far I've only run limited tests, but they've been encouraging. I have a Proliant servera with a 300Mhz Pentium Pro with 512K cache and 64MB RAM running FreeBSD 2.2.6 attached to a Cisco Catalyst 2900 10/100 switch. I can achieve FTP transfers between this machine and a LoseNT Sewer 4.0 system (with identical hardware except for extra RAM) at about 11.5MB/sec in full duplex mode. The LoseNT machine is a little slower transmitting than it is recveiving: transmitting from it to the FreeBSD system typically runs at around 9.8Mb/sec. Transfers between the FreeBSD and another LoseNT 4.0 Workstation machine, this one a Dell with an Intel EtherExpress Pro 100B card, average about 11.5MB/sec both ways. I set up the driver to use PCI memory mapping to access the ThunderLAN's registers as opposed to using programmed I/O, which is what both the Linux and NetBSD drivers do. There probably isn't any particular advantage to doing it this way, but it seemed niftier somehow. I also set up the receive and transmit lists such that the chip DMA's data directly between mbufs and its internal SRAM in order to avoid buffer copies. The driver also includes ifmedia, multicast and BPF support. I would appreciate if people running FreeBSD 2.2.6 that have Compaq hardware could test this driver to make sure it works, and if people running 3.0-current who know their way around the kernel networking code could review the code to see if it actually does the right thing on 3.0. My porting to 3.0 basically consisted of copying the driver to bento.freebsd.org and hammering on it for a few minutes until it compiled; odds are this was not enough. Please send bug reports, success reports or patches to wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu. -Bill -- ============================================================================= -Bill Paul (212) 854-6020 | System Manager, Master of Unix-Fu Work: wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu | Center for Telecommunications Research Home: wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu | Columbia University, New York City ============================================================================= "It is not I who am crazy; it is I who am mad!" - Ren Hoek, "Space Madness" ============================================================================= To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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