EtherExpress PRO/100 Intelligent Server Adapter with i960(R) proces sor

[Rogier Wolff]

Jeffrey Hundstad wrote:
> My brand-spank'n-new "EtherExpress PRO/100 Intelligent Server Adapter
> with i960(R) processor" showed up today and I instlled it.  It was
> undetected by the eepro100.c:v1.06 10/16/98 driver that comes with
> linux-2.1.131.  Is there a driver that does work with this card?  Or
> am I doing something wrong?

Intel makes a chip called the 82557 (and its fancier brother 82558).
Those are Ethernet controllers. The eepro100 driver can handle those
chips. 

Your card has a complete processor on the card, an Intel 960, that
will need to get programmed. This is probably also an pci/pci bridge,
so, with a bit of luck there is very little to do before the eepro100
driver can work with the 82558 chip that I expect on your board. 

However you're not using the i960 chip to offload the CPU.

Having an extra CPU that can "do" things for you, is pretty
nice. However its usefulness still has to be seen: Linux doesn't lend
itself very good for a network card that could do more than just shove
the packets out of the door. The 82557 can already independently of
the processor push packets onto the wire.

So what could we have the '960 do?

I think that the best we can do is to make the "bottom half" of the
driver a complete "noop". Best-case, we could have the '960
independently scan the standard "device queue" and process it into
the list that the '557 can handle.

					Roger.


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