Subject: Re: SONIC driver?
To: Hans-Christian Becker <hcb@phc.chalmers.se>
From: Christopher R. Bowman <crb@glue.umd.edu>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 12/05/1996 15:17:47
>What's the status on the quadra ethernet driver? I'll eat almost anything
>thrown at me ;-) (My machine is a quadra 840 AV). Oh, and I'll do the
>compile, if that is of any help...
>
>Regards,
>/hcb

SONIC support will do you no good becuase the 660 and 840 use a chip called
curio that is basically an AMD MACE + 53c94 + SCC on a single ASIC.  In
addition it is probably hard to get a good implementation of ethernet on
these machines because the MACE is really designed to be used with an
external DMA controller and though docs are available onthe MACE and 53c94
there is no publicly available information on the apple DMA controller.

Having said all that; I have looked at the driver files for the MACE chip
that are part of DR1 of mklinux, and the AMD docs on the MACE, and I think
it should be possible to take the current ethernet driver code for 8390
based boards and cobble up a programmed io style driver for the 660/840
ethernet.

After exams are over a week from saturday, and if I can get my IIci to stay
up reliably, I plan to take a stab at this, unfortunately I have never
hacked the kernel before, and I have little knowledge of the
driver/ether/TCP workings, I just intend to take the functions in the
current driver and replace them with code that does the same thing for the
MACE.  I have little hope that I will get things working, but it'll be fun
anyway.

---------
Christopher R. Bowman
crb@eng.umd.edu
My home page