In reply to Robert L. Shady who said
> 
> I have recently purchased a dealer demo version of an NE2100 compatible 
> Vesa Local Bus ethernet card.  The problem is, the NE2100 driver in NetBSD
> requires the use of a DMA channel, while the localbus card does not.  Is
> this as simple as adding code to allow the driver to work without a DMA
> channel, or does the entire way the driver works have to be rewritten?
> 

It's possible this is a shared mem card, though I was under the impression
no-one was actually making shared mem versions of these type of cards any more.

AMD have a LANCE compatible (more or less) chip that claims to be
a NE2100 clone. It more or less is and this card may claim NE2100
compatibility because it uses that new chip. It doesn't necessarily
mean it's totally compatible with the real NE2100 cards. The new
AMD chip does have an option to be configured as a shared mem
device.

What does the probe message say? In particular, is the chip a LANCE
or a PCNet-ISA.

I'm going to look at adding shared mem support to the if_is driver for FreeBSD
at some point, likely to be about a month. I don't think it will drop cleanly
into NetBSD anymore but I'm sure it could easily be ported.

Of course, your card may not be a shared mem card either, in which case I'm 
puzzled. In any case, if it really is a NE2100 clone, even if not an exact 
clone, you wouldn't need to re-write much of the driver -- most of it is
pretty generic.


-- 
  Paul Richards, FreeBSD core team member.
  Intelligent Systems Laboratory, ELSYM ,University of Wales, College Cardiff
  Internet: paul@isl.cf.ac.uk,  JANET(UK): RICHARDSDP@UK.AC.CARDIFF

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