Re: Ethernet support

[Geert U. <ge...@li...>]

On Sun, 30 Jul 2000, Rudi Chiarito wrote:
> I've been looking at APUS' support for Zorro Ethernet cards and it
> doesn't seem that encouraging. The FAQ, which is quite old, lists only
> the A2065, the AriadneI/II and the Hydra as supported.

And PCMCIA NE2000 clones through the apne driver?

The Hydra driver is probably no longer functional, since it's been a while ago
that it actually compiled, IIRC.

> I was interested in getting an X-Surf, but apparently there's no driver
> for it. I know that it comes with full programming documentation and that
> it shouldn't be impossible to adapt an existing driver for Realtek
> chipsets, but these days time definitely isn't something I have plenty
> of. ;(((

Which Realtek chip? I guess the RTL8019AS? That would be the most logical
choice.

If that's the case, you probably have to change only a few of the first 16
#define's in ariadne2.c and replace ZORRO_PROD_VILLAGE_TRONIC_ARIADNE2 by the
Zorro ID of the X-Surf (0x12121700, if I'm not mistaken). All the rest in the
driver is plain NE2000 stuff.

Is the full programming documentation available in electronic form? If you
send it to me, I might even adapt ariadne2.c myself...

> The AriadneII could be the second option, but the FAQ says it runs at 10%
> the speed of the Amiga (SANA) driver. Have things improved in the
> meantime? The cards also seem to be harder to find, BTW.

That's weird. AFAIK the Ariadne II driver gets nearly 1 MB/s if you have a
fast CPU. Since that's close to the theoretical limit of Ethernet, I don't
think there's much area for improvement.

> Any suggestions?

Buy an X-surf, and get it to work :-)

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- ge...@li...

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds