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Fixing, reestoring DEC FDDI (DEFPA/DEFEA/DEFTA/DEFQA) in 8.2, 9.2; restore to -current?



[[cc'ed to thropejj as the lst person I know whotouched the PDQ code.  tech-net for discussion of refactoring ether_ifattach ]]

I'm nearing the end of reviving some DECstations and a few Vaxes.  One of the things I need/want for them is FDDI.
FDDI -- from the DEC "pdq"-based boards -- is the fastest, cheapest, and most readily available 100Mbit tecnoligy for Turbochannel and EISA.

Turns out  that  fddi_ifattach() is broken in 8.2 and 9.2.  It never initialises sc_ec.ec_lock, which causes a panic the fisrt time the kernel tries to add a multicast address to the interface.  If you're using IPv6 (I don't; I comment out "options INET6"),  the panic occurs soon after boot when ipv6 discovery starts.

A minimal-touch fix is straightfoward; see attached diff against NetBSD-8.2.  (Should work against 9.2, haven't tested yet).
After applying this to 8.2 kernel source and rebuilding, I have a pair of back-to-back, dual-attach DEFPAs (PCI FDDI).
I statically configure IP (v4) via /etc/ifconfig.fpa.  They happily ping each other, I can ssh across the FDDi interface, etc.

I would like to restore "pdq" (fpa, fea, fta, whatever a qbus attachment is; or write one if none) to -current.
However, 10_RC4. doesn't even have if_fddisubr.c. 

I don;t want to re-create the hack of having two different initialisers for the IEE 802 (sic) [*] portions of "struct ethercom'.
A cleaner solution is to declare a new struct with all the members of 'struct ethercom', except the  'struct  ifnet ec_if;
'struct ethercom' then becomes a struct with two members: a struct ifnet, and the new struct (struct iee802_common?).
That allows clean separation of code which manipulates the additions in today's "struct ethercom', from code which also manipulates struct ifnet.

Thoughts?  Anyone actively against  PR'ing and (hopefully) minimal patches NetBSD-8 and NetBSD-9?
Or against restoring FDDI to -current. (and perhaps backporting to NetBSD-10)?
If I have to, I can probably ship a pair of DEFTAs to an interested contributor, if support from me is too tenuous.

[*] FDDI is not IEEE 802. But it's derived from Token Ring,, 802.5, which is. And I suppose the refactoring I'm proposing here could add supporing Token Ring, if anyone actively wanted to...

--Jonathan





Attachment: fix-8.2-pdq.diff
Description: Binary data



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