From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: [386BSD] Intel 586 support?
Organization: Weber State University  (Ogden, UT)
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 92 20:38:26 GMT

In article <1eitflINN6jv@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> ljo@r2d2.eeap.cwru.edu (L. Jonas Olsson) writes:
>Does anyone have a driver for an Intel 82586 based ethernet board?
> I know about Terry's starlan driver, but the source code doesn't
>seem to be available and it does not recognize this AT&T Starlan
>(fiber optic media)
> I also know about the Mach3 if_pc586 ethernet driver, but I have not
>succeeded in getting the port to work. (It finds the card, boots, but
>after that there are many calls to the hwrst routine in the driver)

The StarLAN driver wasn't written by me; it was written by Garrett Wollman
(wollman@trantor.emba.uvm.edu) at the University of Vermont.

Here is the posted information (Message-ID: <1992Aug11.174255.5756@uvm.edu>):

> Announcing a functional Ethernet driver for cards based on the Intel
> i82586 and i82596 Ethernet controllers.  Currently, the driver
> supports only the AT&T<boo, hiss> StarLAN-10/EN-100 series cards, but
> porting the drivers to other Ethernet controllers is the matter of
> writing three new functions and modifying the switch statements in
> ieprobe() appropriately.
> 
> This driver supports multiple receive buffers and a single transmit
> buffer, has has been tested to some degree.  Certain unusual
> conditions have been left un-handled, as I'm not entirely sure how to
> deal with them as yet.  If you find any bugs, please communicate them
> (preferably with fixes) directly to me (wollman@emba.uvm.edu).
> 
> Here is a reasonable configuration for this adapter:
> 
> device ie0 at isa? port 0x360 net irq 3 iomem 0xd0000 iosiz ? vector ieintr
>
> You will need to add a line in files.i386:
> i386/isa/if_ie.c        optional ie device-driver

This is actually not the most recent posting, and the driver has been updated
to include a number of bug fixes by myself and the original author.

I was not given permission to include the driver in the patch kit; to be
fair, the patch kit makes it difficult to distribute README's or other
documentation not in "man" format, and no such documentation existed for
the driver; therefore credit wouldn't be very conspicuous.  Also Garrett 
felt that it was not releasable except as a beta as it was, although I
find the newer driver massively more stable (still has occasional crashes
with massive net loading -- for instance, start 5 ping -f's against
another box, and it will crash 386BSD pretty quickly).

If you get the driver from him, you can easily add more card types, since
the majority of the code is shared and what isn't is function vector
table driven; if you have documentation for the new card, adding it if it
uses the same chip set should be cake.  I suspect that the AT&T StarLAN
fiber optic card would just need a type recognition field and could use
the same functions as the other AT&T cards.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@icarus.weber.edu
					terry_lambert@novell.com
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
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