Re: [ethmac] specification for eth MAC

[Kent Dahlgren <kent@praesum.com>]

At 05:39 PM 4/11/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Kent Dahlgren wrote:
> > The question that I was asking was does anyone have any preferences about
> > which commercially available NIC to use as the basis for the 
> specification. The
> > goal here is not to have to write drivers.
>
>I highly disagree with this goal.  We should follow the lead of the
>OpenRISC 1000 project -- make the best possible hardware for the given
>goal.  Hardware compatibility ALWAYS leads to baggage (increasing chip
>size) and bugs.

Ignoring experience gained by the work of others ALWAYS leads to mistakes and
baggage. The point here is not to slavishly clone something, but to use a 
well thought
out specification as a starting point. As for bugs, my experience has been 
that that
nastiest ones are the one that result from ill considered architectural 
decisions.

In any case there will be no bugs in this implementation since it will be 
thoroughly
debugged in an FPGA (famous last words) ;-)

>As the current maintainer of Tulip and RTL8139 drivers in kernel 2.3.x,
>I hope I know something on the subject.  :)

Great! I always believe in designing hardware based on the software 
viewpoint. So why
don't you tell us what you favorite NIC is and we can start from there. I 
just find it hard
to buy into the argument that all of the current implementations are crap 
and that we
have to start from a blank sheet of paper.

>I am not a CmpE or EE guy, so I don't have much contribute on the
>hardware design side.  However, I've done several Linux kernel drivers
>so I am attempting to make up for that my offering to help with the
>driver writing.

Again, if you are willing to write a driver for it we can tailor it for the 
application.

Kent
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