I'd like to axe some drivers
Garrett Wollman
wollman at hergotha.csail.mit.edu
Thu Nov 20 22:54:57 UTC 2014
In article <201411201631.27556.jhb at freebsd.org>, John Baldwin writes:
>ie(4): Unfortunately, someone actually found one of these and tested it
> several years ago when I added locking to it. It is the only ISA
> NIC driver that doesn't have a pccard attachment (you can in theory
> still use a pccard NIC in a cardbus slot (though not ExpressCard)).
> This also only does 10Mb using PIO (no DMA). It doesn't use
> bus_space.
The chip absolutely does do DMA, but at the time this driver was
written, the only hardware I ever saw used dual-ported RAM (on the ISA
bus) rather than DMA. (You'll recall that the ISA DMA controller was
rather limited and could not operate autonomously in the way that a
network controller needs.)
I've been hoping this driver (which I wrote) would get axed for many
many years, but someone has always stepped up in the past to save it.
As a bonus, removing it also gets rid of a non-standard license from
the tree (which I could never change since I no longer have a legal
relationship with the University of Vermont). I haven't seen the
hardware this was written for in more than 20 years, and I don't think
I kept the databook. (For what it's worth, pretty much every Intel
network controller designed since has had the same basic programming
interface -- it's just the bus glue logic and the assignment of bits
in the control blocks that changes!)
-GAWollman
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