[lwip-devel] possible contribution - network driver?

[Colin Nichols]

Hi all,

I sent this to the users list yesterday; perhaps it's better-suited for 
this list...

First off, I just want to say that lwIP is pretty cool!

I have a possible contribution... I ported the BSD driver for the 
Broadcom NetXtreme II cards to my own OS... These are server cards found 
on many Dell blades and elsewhere throughout the server room.   The 
driver relied on a large number of BSD-specific functions.  I pulled 
these out, reduced them to a minimal set, and moved the function 
definitions into a couple "sys_arch.c" type files.

The OS-dependent parts are what you'd expect to find for a network 
driver (DMA memory allocation, watchdog timer creation, PCI access 
functions, interrupt setup, etc), and again are as minimal as possible.  
I think think implementation could be handy for others to incorporate 
with lwIP/their OS.

Some parts of the driver are really rough (especially dealing with the 
MII bus and PHY) but it's functional (at least for the card I've got, 
5709S).  I'm working on cleaning it up and expanding support to the 
other cards in the NetXtreme II line.

Also pbufs aren't integrated into the DMA buffers, so it's not exactly 
zero-copy.  It wouldn't be too difficult to do, though.

I wanted to ask the larger dev group if this would be a useful contribution?

Best regards,
Colin