In message <200504250304.j3P34gqI005704@morgart.com>,
"William S. Morgart" writes:

>I have ported Quinton Dolan's FreeBSD i386 port of the NVidia NForce
>ethernet driver to NetBSD (>= 2.99.17). 


Just out of curiosity: have you looked at the Linux `forcedeth'
driver? I haven't, but if it really works, and nVidia is sending the
developers diffs, then maybe the info there will enough to write a
full-source, BSD-licence *BSD driver?

Just a thought.

>It is functional and has some
>open issues - multicast support foremost since I don't have a
>multicast environment to test in.

Have you tried pinging 224.0.0.1?


>The driver requires the addition of support for the Realtek 8139 PHY
>device. I've ported the FreeBSD version written by Bill Paul
><wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu>. of this support to NetBSD. The kernel config
>changes can be found in the nvnet driver tar file or at
>http://www.morgart.com/NetBSD/Realtek8139/rlphy.tgz.
>
>I'm providing the Realtek support separately in the hope that it can
>be added to the main NetBSD source.

I skimmed this very quickly. a few quick comments:

I didn't understand the check for an `rl' parent device: If you're
using that phy with the nforce ethernet driver, does the nforce attach
as some kind of `rl'. or an `nv', or what? Am I missing something?

Also, if we did import this, we should rip out the corresponding code
from the 81x9 driver (we don't want to duplicate it).

Last: does the FreeBSD driver work with the gigabit Nvidia Ethernet?
Have you tried it? Will it need yet more PHY support?


>The nvnet driver itself I don't
>think can be added to the NetBSD source tree since it includes both
>GPL code as well as a NVidia supplied object library but I'm hoping it
>can at least be included as a package!
>
>Any comments, suggestions for improvements, etc. would be appreciated.

Hence my (perhaps ignorant) question about the `forcedeth' driver....
writing a driver based on that would be one way around all the GPL issues.