Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 22:32:24 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Doug Hass" <dhass@imagestream.com> Cc: "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org>, "Jim Bryant" <kc5vdj@yahoo.com>, "MurrayTaylor" <taylorm@bytecraft.au.com>, <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: FYI Message-ID: <000901c156cd$19a654a0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.1011016113849.861B-100000@ims1.imagestream.com>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Doug Hass >Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2001 9:54 AM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt >Cc: Leo Bicknell; Jim Bryant; MurrayTaylor; freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG; >freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: RE: FYI > > >Let's dispense with all the talk about $75 T1 cards that don't exist (and >won't for some time), whose licensing scheme is better, what driver >architecture was developed for what reason and let's get back to the >original issues: > >1) Availability of the 400 series cards. > >If the FreeBSD market has the 400 series cards in such demand, then >someone should be calling me with an order. I'll cut 20% off list for you >if you tell me its for FreeBSD, and I'll still pledge 15% of your purchase >price on top of that toward driver development. I'll give up my volume >margin as a clear indication of my willingness to work with the community. > Well, Murray started all this by asking for ONE WANic 400. ;-) FreeBSD has an eclectic mix of device drivers - some are personal efforts, some are contributed by corporations, some are ports from other OS's and some are a mix of all of the above. The point is that incentives can take forms other than just money. Getting contributed code is a very powerful incentive, and there's a lot of code in the driver modules for the WANic 5xx, 6xx 8xx and the Aries and Maxim cards that Imagestream has driver code for. Is there any way to get some of this - NOT under GPL and NOT under NDA? There's at least one person during this thread who was looking for a DS-3 card like a WANic 8xx You _did_ mention that some of the card modules in SAND are not under NDA? We might be easier getting 10 buyers for DS3 cards than 100 buyers for WANic 4xx cards, if you get my drift. >The drivers BSDI developed and gave to the community for the 400 series >are seriously out of date, by the way. >Last I knew, they still referred >to the cards as the "n2pci" and used some outdated code that has since >been much improved. I'd be interested in working with a developer or >developers to get some updated drivers out there for FreeBSD. Doug, as a FYI, I believe that I can fill in a bit on the state of the sr driver. They don't actually refer to the cards as the n2pci (now, at least) They have had work done to them already by John Hay and Julian. This brings >me to... > >2) Driver development for FreeBSD > >We'll pledge 15% of the purchase of the aforementioned 400 series cards >toward supporting a developer or developers to bring drivers to the >FreeBSD market. The 400 series drivers need to be updated. Yes and no - there is one bug in there that needs killing still but otherwise the driver for the 400 is OK. Let me explain the history as I am aware of it. As you stated, BSDI wrote a driver for the RISCom/N2 card and contributed this back to SDL. I believe that this version made it's way to John Hay and formed the base of the FreeBSD sr driver. At some point, this driver was enhanced by either BSDI or SDL to add support for the later RISCom cards that had an integrated T1 CSU. This support does NOT appear in the FreeBSD driver. It's not possible to use port1 (the one with the CSU port) in a FreeBSD system at this time. It may be that John Hay chopped out this support but more likely he was working with an older version of the driver. I have the source for the later N2 driver that has the integrated CSU. It would be nice if someone would put the CSU support into the FreeBSD driver. I looked at doing it myself but there's now big differences between this BSDI/SDL driver and the one in FreeBSD, too much for me to be able to do it. I would gladly loan a disk with this source plus a later model RISComN2 card with the integrated CSU port to anyone who would do it. I'm sure that someone like Julian or John could do it. At any rate, the FreeBSD fork of this driver was later modified to support the PCI version of the RISCom, the WANic 400/405 cards. Since the WANic 405 series has no integrated CSU, the sr driver works with both ports on it. The sr driver has gone through some debugging by John Hay, and Rodney Grimes. I've worked with Rod on this some, and he has discovered 2 bugs that appear on the WANic405 driver. I've verified that both of these bugs exist. The first bug deals with the interrupt handling of the transmit register. It appears on all RISCom and WANic card variants. Rod has written a patch for this and the patch works. Without the patch, the cards lose packets. John has not gotten a copy of this patch nor integrated it into the current version of the sr driver, unfortunately. The patch is for 1.34.2.2 of the driver that comes in FreeBSD 4.3 and unfortunately Rod got it completed after John made more changes. I don't think Rod has reved it to the current rev. The second bug only appears on WANic 405's and is triggered by high volume rates on both interfaces simultaneously. Rod has been unable to isolate the problem but he and I confirmed that it only appears with dual-port cards. The bug causes about 10% packet loss to be noted on a Pentium 200. I believe that it is possible to minimize the effects of this bug by using the cards in a much faster CPU. Other than that the FreeBSD sr driver is stable, has not caused a crash or other problem on the hardware I've used it on over the last year and a half, on a busy Internet router that runs BGP. >There are a >full line of cards available now that also need drivers. Even if no one >in the community is willing to pledge money (through a card purchase or >directly to a developer), I'm assuming that someone out there would be >interested in developing the drivers. > >Again, if the FreeBSD market has WAN cards in such a high demand, we need >to get developers on the driver development immediately. Now that you >know we are interested, the code is available, and that we've pledged >money toward it, I'd like to see someone in the community start working >toward a solution, instead of complaining about how there isn't one. > Well, we _had_ a solution - the 400/405 that worked well, and has a Netgraph-enabled driver for it. I guess that nobody let you guys know at Imagestream that developers in the FreeBSD community were maintaining the "old" BSDI driver. Sigh. What we don't have is a solution for the 5xx and later cards. But I think that there would be even more interest on a DS3 card like the WANic 8xx Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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