EtherExpress PRO/100 Intelligent Server Adapter with i960(R) proces sor

[aaronl@vitelus.com]

On Fri, 11 Dec 1998, Rogier Wolff wrote:

> Jeffrey Hundstad wrote:
> > My brand-spank'n-new "EtherExpress PRO/100 Intelligent Server Adapter
> > with i960(R) processor" showed up today and I instlled it.  It was
> > undetected by the eepro100.c:v1.06 10/16/98 driver that comes with
> > linux-2.1.131.  Is there a driver that does work with this card?  Or
> > am I doing something wrong?
> 
> Intel makes a chip called the 82557 (and its fancier brother 82558).
> Those are Ethernet controllers. The eepro100 driver can handle those
> chips. 
> 
> Your card has a complete processor on the card, an Intel 960, that
> will need to get programmed. This is probably also an pci/pci bridge,
> so, with a bit of luck there is very little to do before the eepro100
> driver can work with the 82558 chip that I expect on your board. 
> 
> However you're not using the i960 chip to offload the CPU.
> 
> Having an extra CPU that can "do" things for you, is pretty
> nice. However its usefulness still has to be seen: Linux doesn't lend
> itself very good for a network card that could do more than just shove
> the packets out of the door. The 82557 can already independently of
> the processor push packets onto the wire.
> 
> So what could we have the '960 do?
>
> I think that the best we can do is to make the "bottom half" of the
> driver a complete "noop". Best-case, we could have the '960
> independently scan the standard "device queue" and process it into
> the list that the '557 can handle.

a noop? why not make the bottom half of the driver an rc5 client? ;-)
 
> 					Roger.
> 
> 
> -- 
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