Re: [ethmac] specification for eth MAC

[Kent Dahlgren <kent@praesum.com>]

At 05:37 PM 4/11/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Novan Hartadi wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, 7 Apr 2000, Kent Dahlgren wrote:
> >
> > > In any case I don't really care much which one is chosen, let's just pick
> > > one and
> > > get on with it. There are several commercially available devices 
> which have
> > > well
> > > documented interfaces.
> > >
> > > Does anyone else have any preferences?
> > >
> > > Kent
> > >
> >
> > My preferences for Eth MAC 10/100 Mbps :
> > - symmetrical format receive and transmit descriptors
> > - separates FIFO for transmit and receive (what is its size for optimal
> >   performance ?)
> > - supports full duplex and half duplex for both 10 and 100 Mbps operations
> > - supports auto-negotiation
>
>100% agreed

I haven't seen a 10/100 NIC in a long time that didn't support this, so I don't
think that this narrows it down much.

> > My questions :
> > - actually, do we need multicast addrees filtering
>
>IMHO yes, if there are lots of multicast packets the host CPU must
>process ALL of them, if the chip doesn't do filtering for us.

And it's not hard to implement some reasonable filtering mechanism.

Kent
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