driver for et131x?

driver for et131x?

[Manfred Schwarb]

[ next try, first attempt was blocked because of an '@' in 'X-Sender:' line? ]


Hi,

meanwhile the Agere et1310 chip has grown to a quite popular network
chip, in laptops as well as for PCI-E cards. The release date of this chip was
already in June 2004, and still no support in mainline linux.

There is apparently an opensource driver from Agere which is maintained by
volunteers at http://sourceforge.net/projects/et131x/

It seems some distros (e.g. Ubuntu) even patch their kernels with this driver.

Please consider adding support for this chip in mainline linux.

Thanks a lot!
Manfred


see also:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/7/3/123
http://dadams1969.googlepages.com/et131xkernelmodule

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Re: driver for et131x?

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 11:02:53AM +0100, Manfred Schwarb wrote:
> meanwhile the Agere et1310 chip has grown to a quite popular network
> chip, in laptops as well as for PCI-E cards. The release date of this chip was
> already in June 2004, and still no support in mainline linux.
> 
> There is apparently an opensource driver from Agere which is maintained by
> volunteers at http://sourceforge.net/projects/et131x/
> 
> It seems some distros (e.g. Ubuntu) even patch their kernels with this driver.
> 
> Please consider adding support for this chip in mainline linux.

The driver on the above site would need quite a bit of work to bring it
up to Linux standards.  That work shouldn't be difficult but enough to
keep someone busy for a while.  If you have the hardware I'd be happy yo
guide you through the required work.  Are you interested in taking up
this project?

Re: driver for et131x?

[Manfred Schwarb]

> The driver that is available is NOT open souce. It was released under the
> BSD license.
> I tried getting Agere to release under the GPL, but the main dev there
> (Victor) said that it wasn't happening and that we'd have to use it the
> way
> it is.
> 

As far as I know (IANAL), a BSD Licence is open source. In fact, it 
is more liberal than GPL. I think it means you can do whatever you
want, you only have to retain the copyright notice. It is even possible
to fork the code and change the licence to GPL. In fact such things
have already been done in linux. There exists also numerous code in linux
which is dual-licenced under BSD and GPL (which means you can choose one
or the other at your will).

I don't know how the linux community would like to handle things, but
I think it should be possible somehow.

Regards,
Manfred


> On Jan 4, 2008 4:02 AM, Manfred Schwarb <manfred99@gmx.ch> wrote:
> 
> > [ next try, first attempt was blocked because of an '@' in 'X-Sender:'
> > line? ]
> >
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > meanwhile the Agere et1310 chip has grown to a quite popular network
> > chip, in laptops as well as for PCI-E cards. The release date of this
> chip
> > was
> > already in June 2004, and still no support in mainline linux.
> >
> > There is apparently an opensource driver from Agere which is maintained
> by
> > volunteers at http://sourceforge.net/projects/et131x/
> >
> > It seems some distros (e.g. Ubuntu) even patch their kernels with this
> > driver.
> >
> > Please consider adding support for this chip in mainline linux.
> >
> > Thanks a lot!
> > Manfred
> >
> >
> > see also:
> > http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/7/3/123
> > http://dadams1969.googlepages.com/et131xkernelmodule
> >


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Re: driver for et131x?

[Manfred Schwarb]

Christoph,

> On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 11:02:53AM +0100, Manfred Schwarb wrote:
> > meanwhile the Agere et1310 chip has grown to a quite popular network
> > chip, in laptops as well as for PCI-E cards. The release date of this
> chip was
> > already in June 2004, and still no support in mainline linux.
> > 
> > There is apparently an opensource driver from Agere which is maintained
> by
> > volunteers at http://sourceforge.net/projects/et131x/
> > 
> > It seems some distros (e.g. Ubuntu) even patch their kernels with this
> driver.
> > 
> > Please consider adding support for this chip in mainline linux.
> 
> The driver on the above site would need quite a bit of work to bring it
> up to Linux standards.  That work shouldn't be difficult but enough to
> keep someone busy for a while.  If you have the hardware I'd be happy yo
> guide you through the required work.  Are you interested in taking up
> this project?

I'm afraid my c and linux network driver programming knowledge is not
good enough to dare to take up such a project.

However, I would volunteer to do the dirty work, i.e. bring it to 
linux coding style, try to clean up some #ifdef and typedef things,
if there is someone to take it over afterwards, who will do the
"real" work.

Regards,
Manfred

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