Re: Elks networking

Marc-François LUCCA-DANIAU
2017-01-28T07:50:47Z

Perhaps you meant "ez-dos" ?

As stated in a previous post by Alan, driving the old-fashion NE2K
chip (and compatible) through the ISA bus (or equivalent on embedded
system) is quite easy. I am currently writing the driver from scratch,
after reading the datasheet and being inspired by some other driver
implementations (DOS packet driver, BIOS diag, etc), to avoid any
license concern.

Any pointer to other implementation is welcome, for background
information and benchmarking purpose.

About integration of such driver in ELKS, the discussion is still open
today. Initial intent is to replace the low-level layer of KTCP that
sends / receives the packet on the /tty interface for SLIP, but it
appears that program needs to be reworked, to implement an ARP
transponder, and the driver needs to implement the select / poll
operations for efficient processing (as /tty that is selectable).

So I am focusing now on having a code that is able to configure the
PHY, to control the MAC to stack / unstack packets, and being notified
of packet reception. After this first step, I would deliver to Jody's
master and ask the community for guidelines for ELKS integration.

MFLD

2017-01-27 5:19 GMT+01:00 GOliath Keet <goliath.keet@gmail.com>:
> would any of the networking code from ez-nos be any good? that was open
> sourced a few years ago,
>
> I do have somewhere a email from the original author with permission to use
> his code,
>
> how difficult would it be to get a dos network driver to load as intended on
> elks? and then interface with that ?
>
> On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 7:48 PM, Marc-F. LUCCA-DANIAU <mfld.fr@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Not forgotten, and now tracked by:
>>
>> https://github.com/mfld-fr/elks/issues/1
>>
>> MFLD
>>
>>>
>>> Le 31/05/2016 à 12:50, Alan a écrit :
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I am also interested in such NE2000 driver, because the ETH chip on my
>>>>> SBC is an Asix AX88796-L, and according to its datasheet, it claims
>>>>> "register level compatibility with NE2000".
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> The best place to start are the DOS packet drivers which are GPL but in
>>>> 8086 asm. Unlike the rather convoluted SMP aware IRQ driven Linux
>>>> drivers they implement IRQ based receive notification and blocking
>>>> transmit in a tiny driver, which is the kind of model needed for a low
>>>> end CPU and something like ELKS.
>>>>
>>>> As a chip it is pretty easy to drive although it is best to debug on an
>>>> emulator until it works as the real NE2000 has a very antisocial
>>>> attitude to incorrect I/O accesses (it hangs the machine solid).
>>>>
>>>> On top of that you need an implementation of ARP and then the TCP/IP
>>>> stack.
>>>>
>>>> Alan
>>>>
>>>