Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 18:07:09 +0100 From: Maxime Henrion <mux@freebsd.org> To: Alan Lai <clai33@uwo.ca> Cc: Jeremy Faulkner <gldisater@gldis.ca>, questions@freebsd.org, sparc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Hardware support under UltraSPARC Message-ID: <20030220170709.GK60813@elvis.mu.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.21.0302201155230.6512-100000@panther.uwo.ca> References: <20030220154234.GA12821@constans.gldis.ca> <Pine.SOL.4.21.0302201155230.6512-100000@panther.uwo.ca>
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Alan Lai wrote: > freebsd has those drivers for x86 machines, is that possible to compile > them for ultrasparc machines? > is there any way to get an x86 nic work under freebsd/ultrasparc? > if so, whats the work that i have to do? > please advice You first need to convert the card to use the busdma API if it's not using it already, and you then have to deal with endianness issues (FreeBSD/sparc64 is big endian). Look at the http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/busdma/ for more information on busdma. More specifically, you can look at the xl(4) driver which has recently been converted to busdma and made endian-safe. > is the freebsd-sparc kernel not open source? i cannot compile/custimize it > myself? Err, the FreeBSD project is entirely opensource. The biggest part of the kernel is MI (machine independant) and thus doesn't have to be changed to work on other architectures. A smaller part of the kernel is MD (machine dependant) and needs to be written for every different architecture we support. The sparc64 specific sources of the FreeBSD kernel can be found in /usr/src/sys/sparc64. > On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, Jeremy Faulkner wrote: > > > On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 10:10:53AM -0500, Alan Lai wrote: > > > Hello, > > > > > > I am a newbie to freebsd, I want to clarify something before I get into > > > using it. > > > > > > I plan to put freebsd5 on a sun e250, this is a pci based ultrasparc > > > machine, but at the same time, this machine has a non-sun hardware, which > > > is a network card thats originally for x86 machine. This card is working > > > probably under solaris w/ some non-official driver, & is supported under > > > linux/x86. My question is, will this card, intel fastethernet 100, or > > > 3com590 work under freebsd/ultrasparc w/ some tiny tinkering? > > > > It's unlikely, since the drivers for those cards are commented out in > > sys/sparc64/conf/GENERIC. The drivers probably need work to use busdma. I don't remember whether 3c590 cards are supported by xl(4). If so, it should just work on sparc64. It hasn't been uncommented in GENERIC yet, but I'll do it a second. The Intel card won't work on sparc64 yet, but I'm currently working on the fxp(4) driver for the busdma conversion. Once this is done, we need to make it endian-safe in order for it to work on sparc64. Cheers, Maxime To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-sparc" in the body of the message
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