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Re: 3c515 status?




Harald Milz wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I asked for support of the 3com 3c515 card looooong ago, did anything
> happen yet? I am not in the (programming) position to do it myself, soo ...
> IIRC there was a way to take the linux device driver source code and convert
> it somehow?

[Assuming that you want an Etherboot driver...]

There seem to be only few 3c515 around (it's an ISA PnP 10/100Mbps card,
which I wasn't aware that such a thing exists at all until a few seconds
ago).  There are two major reasons that it's unlikely that someone writes
a driver for it:
1) It's a PnP card, and there is no ISA PnP support yet in Etherboot, and
   looking at the Linux ISA PnP stuff, it's not really trivial.
2) There must be a person who both owns (or has access to) a 3c515, has the
   knowledge (or the time to learn) how to write an Etherboot driver, and
   has the time programming and testing the driver.

Using the Linux driver source is the standard way to start developing a new
Etherboot driver, but there's no straigtforward way to do that - Linux uses
interrupts, and Etherboot uses polling.

I finished a driver a friend started (the one for the Realtek 8139), and
it took a lot longer to get it stable than I thought initially.  Essentially
the Linux driver can be used as a summary of the chip documentation (and the
card detection/initialization code usually only needs minor changes), but
the transmit/receive logic needs to be rewritten entirely.

Klaus
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