[Barrelfish-users] Tulip driver

[Timothy Roscoe]

Hi Patrik, 

Paul Barham wrote the Tulip driver a long time ago, since that was the
network adaptor supported by Hyper-V.  Since we last used it, there
have been two major changes to Barrelfish which make the driver
somewhat out-of-date:

 1) The interface between network drivers and the network stack has
    changed (or, more accurately, has now been defined :-).  The RTL
    and e1000 drivers are written to this new interface, and so (apart
    from the documentation) these would be a good place to start
    looking for information (and, as ever, feel free to ask on this
    list). 

 2) The API to the Mackerel-generated code to access hardware has
    changed, but the driver code has not been updated to reflect this.
    Changing this over is a mostly straightforward manual process (and
    results in much more portable code), but errors can creep in so
    it's a good idea to understand what's going on. 

The good news is that Tulip is a very simple, clean design so it
shouldn't be too difficult (assuming you have access to a real or
virtual one!). 

Doing a quick conversion of the Tulip driver Mackerel2 (at least to
the point where it compiles) has been a low-priority item on my to-do
list for some time - if I find the time over the next few days I might
have a go, but let me know if you start working on this so we don't
duplicate work. 

 -- Mothy

At Fri, 29 Jun 2012 16:35:49 +0000, Patrik Eklöf <peklof at kth.se> wrote:
> Sounds bad.
> But what exactly does "bit-rotted" mean?
> What needs to be done, except making it work with the current networking API, to make it work?
> If the driver WORKS, but just needs updating to work with the current API, then I might look into it.
> 
> Regards,
> Patrik Eklöf
> Student at ICT, Master of Science in Engineering Education, IT Programme, KTH, Kista
> ________________________________
> From: Baumann Andrew [andrewb at inf.ethz.ch]
> Sent: Friday, June 29, 2012 18:23
> To: Patrik Eklöf; barrelfish-users at lists.inf.ethz.ch
> Subject: RE: Tulip driver
> 
> Hi Patrik,
> 
> The tulip driver hasn’t been built in years AFAIK… it has bit-rotted pretty heavily, and among other things would need to be updated to work with the current networking APIs. But if you wanted to take it on, I’m sure a patch would be welcome :) I guess the starting point would be looking at one of the other working drivers.
> 
> Andrew
> 
> From: Patrik Eklöf [mailto:peklof at kth.se]
> Sent: Friday, 29 June, 2012 9:19
> To: barrelfish-users at lists.inf.ethz.ch
> Subject: [Barrelfish-users] Tulip driver
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'd like to build the tulip driver for bf.
> It would seem that bf does not automatically build this, and there is no mention of this in the network readme.
> Trying to compile manually results in lots of errors (lots of unknown types).
> I'm guessing this driver hasn't been touched in some time? Does it work with an older version of gcc? Should I just try to fix it manually by fixing the errors?
> 
> Regards,
> Patrik Eklöf
> Student at ICT, Master of Science in Engineering Education, IT Programme, KTH, Kista
>