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Tulip Ethernet Card Driver
Maintained by Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@mandrakesoft.com>
The Tulip driver is developed by Donald Becker and changed by
Takashi Manabe and a cast of thousands.
This driver is for the Digital "Tulip" Ethernet adapter interface.
It should work with most DEC 21*4*-based chips/ethercards, as well as
with work-alike chips from Lite-On (PNIC) and Macronix (MXIC) and ASIX.
The author may be reached as becker@CESDIS.gsfc.nasa.gov, or C/O
Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences
Code 930.5, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt MD 20771
Additional information available at
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/tulip.html
Theory of Operation
Board Compatibility
===================
This device driver is designed for the DECchip "Tulip", Digital's
single-chip ethernet controllers for PCI. Supported members of the family
are the 21040, 21041, 21140, 21140A, 21142, and 21143. Similar work-alike
chips from Lite-On, Macronics, ASIX, Compex and other listed below are also
supported.
These chips are used on at least 140 unique PCI board designs. The great
number of chips and board designs supported is the reason for the
driver size and complexity. Almost of the increasing complexity is in the
board configuration and media selection code. There is very little
increasing in the operational critical path length.
Board-specific settings
=======================
PCI bus devices are configured by the system at boot time, so no jumpers
need to be set on the board. The system BIOS preferably should assign the
PCI INTA signal to an otherwise unused system IRQ line.
Some boards have EEPROMs tables with default media entry. The factory default
is usually "autoselect". This should only be overridden when using
transceiver connections without link beat e.g. 10base2 or AUI, or (rarely!)
for forcing full-duplex when used with old link partners that do not do
autonegotiation.
Driver operation
================
Ring buffers
------------
The Tulip can use either ring buffers or lists of Tx and Rx descriptors.
This driver uses statically allocated rings of Rx and Tx descriptors, set at
compile time by RX/TX_RING_SIZE. This version of the driver allocates skbuffs
for the Rx ring buffers at open() time and passes the skb->data field to the
Tulip as receive data buffers. When an incoming frame is less than
RX_COPYBREAK bytes long, a fresh skbuff is allocated and the frame is
copied to the new skbuff. When the incoming frame is larger, the skbuff is
passed directly up the protocol stack and replaced by a newly allocated
skbuff.
The RX_COPYBREAK value is chosen to trade-off the memory wasted by
using a full-sized skbuff for small frames vs. the copying costs of larger
frames. For small frames the copying cost is negligible (esp. considering
that we are pre-loading the cache with immediately useful header
information). For large frames the copying cost is non-trivial, and the
larger copy might flush the cache of useful data. A subtle aspect of this
choice is that the Tulip only receives into longword aligned buffers, thus
the IP header at offset 14 isn't longword aligned for further processing.
Copied frames are put into the new skbuff at an offset of "+2", thus copying
has the beneficial effect of aligning the IP header and preloading the
cache.
Synchronization
---------------
The driver runs as two independent, single-threaded flows of control. One
is the send-packet routine, which enforces single-threaded use by the
dev->tbusy flag. The other thread is the interrupt handler, which is single
threaded by the hardware and other software.
The send packet thread has partial control over the Tx ring and 'dev->tbusy'
flag. It sets the tbusy flag whenever it's queuing a Tx packet. If the next
queue slot is empty, it clears the tbusy flag when finished otherwise it sets
the 'tp->tx_full' flag.
The interrupt handler has exclusive control over the Rx ring and records stats
from the Tx ring. (The Tx-done interrupt can't be selectively turned off, so
we can't avoid the interrupt overhead by having the Tx routine reap the Tx
stats.) After reaping the stats, it marks the queue entry as empty by setting
the 'base' to zero. Iff the 'tp->tx_full' flag is set, it clears both the
tx_full and tbusy flags.
Notes
=====
Thanks to Duke Kamstra of SMC for long ago providing an EtherPower board.
Greg LaPolla at Linksys provided PNIC and other Linksys boards.
Znyx provided a four-port card for testing.
References
==========
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/misc/NWay.html
http://www.digital.com (search for current 21*4* datasheets and "21X4 SROM")
http://www.national.com/pf/DP/DP83840A.html
http://www.asix.com.tw/pmac.htm
http://www.admtek.com.tw/
Errata
======
The old DEC databooks were light on details.
The 21040 databook claims that CSR13, CSR14, and CSR15 should each be the last
register of the set CSR12-15 written. Hmmm, now how is that possible?
The DEC SROM format is very badly designed not precisely defined, leading to
part of the media selection junkheap below. Some boards do not have EEPROM
media tables and need to be patched up. Worse, other boards use the DEC
design kit media table when it isn't correct for their board.
We cannot use MII interrupts because there is no defined GPIO pin to attach
them. The MII transceiver status is polled using an kernel timer.
Source tree tour
----------------
The following is a list of files comprising the Tulip ethernet driver in
drivers/net/tulip subdirectory.
21142.c - 21142-specific h/w interaction
eeprom.c - EEPROM reading and parsing
interrupt.c - Interrupt handler
media.c - Media selection and MII support
pnic.c - PNIC-specific h/w interaction
timer.c - Main driver timer, and misc h/w timers
tulip.h - Private driver header
tulip_core.c - Driver core (a.k.a. where "everything else" goes)
[EOF]
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