[tulip] LinkSys LNE100TX v5 Info

Ryan J Powers rjp@rjpsw.f2s.com
Wed, 5 Sep 2001 14:34:07 -0400


Thank you for the info. I didn't plan on distributing the driver at all. 
My friend has successfully written drivers for his NIC, and he was going 
to assist (do most of it) for my NIC if I could get the info he needed.

I haven't yet looked, but what exactly is the 21140 and 21143? Are they 
data sheets for the chipset used?

Thanks a bunch.
Ryan

On Wednesday, September 5, 2001, at 01:22 , Donald Becker wrote:

> 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
>