Re: [ECOS] PCI Ethernet card

[Nick Garnett <nickg at ecoscentric dot com>]

"Michael Anburaj" <embeddedeng@hotmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> Can somebody suggest be a ethernet card, that can go with my Atlas
> board (has a 33MHz, PCI slot). And for which eCOS has a driver. -
> Available out of Fry's or circuit city kinda shores.
> 
> 
> Dumb Questions:
> 1. Can any Ethernet card available in the market be used with my
> board?

No, only those for which we have drivers -- we don't have the luxury
of having the manufacturers do it for us, like Windows, or an army
of hackers beavering away in their bedrooms like Linux.

The most common PCI card we support is the Intel i82559 based
Ether-Pro cards. But these are relatively expensive. We also have
support for AMD PCNET based cards. Take a look at the ethernet device
driver packages in ecos.db for an idea of what is supported.

One of the problems with a $10 commodity card is that it can be
difficult -- until you've bought it -- to work out exactly what
chipset it uses. And manufacturers sometimes change the design
entirely without changing the model number.

> 2. What specs should I look for when considering one?
> 3. And about the config registers & all other registers viewable over
> PCI & their details for the particular card; will that be provided by
> the manufacturer?

You may be lucky and find the specs on the chipset manufacturer's
website. But these are often under NDA, even for quite old chipsets.
Of course, there is always the driver sources in Linux to look at --
but never copy!

> So, if there is an Ethernet card that eCOS supports,
> please let me know.
> 
> This is just for learning purposes.

If you really want to learn you could look at writing a device driver
for one of the commodity PCI ethernet chipsets. That would be a useful
contribution.

-- 
Nick Garnett                    eCos Kernel Architect
http://www.ecoscentric.com      The eCos and RedBoot experts


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