Re: [Etherboot-developers] Re: Etherboot Broadcom driver

[<ebi...@ln...>]

ke...@us... writes:
> >I find myself with some spare time and would like to take a shot at 
> >writing (leveraging) a driver.  I have not written a device driver 
> >before.  I am comfortable with C.  I have no microprocessor experience 
> >but fortunately the source code for the OS driver is available under 
> >linux.  I have read your developers doc and somewhere you mention that 
> >you are willing to assist in such ventures. Could you let me know if it 
> >is a reasonable project and the best starting point?
> 
> It is a good idea but Eric Biederman has already started one and if Eric
> cannot get a driver to work, nobody can. It's in the 5.1 CVS tree,
> tg3.c. You can help us test it when it's further along.

The driver should be useful at the moment.  More testing could not hurt. 
The tg3 nic has an unreasonable amount of state that must be initialized
and maintained so even after some very heavy whacking of the code it is
by far the largest driver in etherboot.

Since getting the tg3 driver working I have been off on other things
I keep an eye out but mostly I am ignoring the world and writing
a compiler that does not use static variables or a stack, to make
LinuxBIOS easier to cope with.  So I am little distracted at the
moment.

But if you have some of that free time messing testing the tg3 driver
would be good.   The tg3 is actually a terrible place to start writing
drivers as there is no documentation readily available.  I wrote
the whole driver by reading the source of the linux driver and
stripping it down.

Eric