Re: Elks networking

Alan
2016-05-31T10:50:38Z

> 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