Re: [ethmac] first topics

[Kent Dahlgren <kent@praesum.com>]

At 12:57 AM 4/7/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Kent Dahlgren wrote:
> > 3) You are going to make this a 10/100 MAC aren't you. There are three
> > reasons for this:
> >
> >         A) It's not that much harder.
> >         B) It's far more interesting/useful.
> >         C) Trying to find 10 Mb phys these days is difficult.
>
>Agreed.  Plus, you want to be able to do NWay because it seems like the
>only sane and standard method of negotiating cat5 media.

Nway is handled by the phy. The only thing that needs to be in the MAC to
support it is the MII management interface (i.e. MDC MDIO) signals to read
the results of the auto negotiation from the phy registers.

>My suggestion for an architecture:
>
>All 32-bit registers.
>Command buffered.
>Variable receive and transmit descriptor lists and frame sizes.

I propose going one step further, just base the software interface on the DEC
21140 tulip. It's a pretty clean interface and that way the Linux driver is 
done.
Just leave out the fancy multicast filtering features that no one uses and are
patented.

>--
>Jeff Garzik              | Nothing cures insomnia like the
>Building 1024            | realization that it's time to get up.
>MandrakeSoft, Inc.       |        -- random fortune

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