[tulip] LinkSys LNE100TX v5 Info

[Donald Becker]

On Mon, 3 Sep 2001, Ryan J Powers wrote:

> 	I was referred by those in #linpeople on OpenProjects. I'm trying 
> to write drivers for my NIC for BeOS.

Note that the BeOS license conflicts with the GPL.  If you use the Linux
driver source, you may not distribute the resulting driver.

> I've never done anything with 
> Linux drivers, so I can't simply reverse engineer the sources I have. 
> Actually I lied. My friend is trying to write drivers for me. He's done 
> it before, and I'd like to learn, but anyways. I'm told I need to know 
> what the registers are, and how to initialize the ring buffers properly. 
> I hope someone out there can help me, because I have no idea what that 
> means, and I don't want to buy a new NIC.

That's a bad place to start.  It takes a quite a bit of experience
before you can reliably produce a working device driver.  It's far
easier to just buy hardware that works right now.  For one thing, you'll
need a working device driver to test the new one.

The best databook to learn about the Tulip design is the 21140 Hardware
Reference Manual.  You'll have to settle for the slightly more
complicated 21143 manual.  Do a search at http://developer.intel.com

Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993