[Barrelfish-users] Tulip driver

[Patrik Eklöf]

If this driver does indeed support any of the DEC21140A, DEC21041 or DEC21143 NICs, I would be very interested in getting this working again.
If you have any time you'd like to spare in getting it to work if this is the case, I'd like that.

The problem is, I suppose, co-ordinating the work. If it supports on of the above NICs, then I would like to commit resources to make it work, but though I am familiar with C, I am not familiar with Barrelfish, and as such, it might take a lot of work for me to get myself familiar and know that the changes I've made is right.
So I am not sure how well it would work for me to co-work on this.

So maybe it's just better if I ask you to commit any resources you feel you want to put into fixing it first, and then you can direct me to fix the remaining tasks?

Well, feel free to share your thoughts on this. I'd like to get it working if it supports these NICs, but the process of how is irrelevant to me (but help would be very welcome, of course :)).

( I couldn't find a better way to word this :/ )

Regards,
Patrik Eklöf
Student at ICT, Master of Science in Engineering Education, IT Programme, KTH, Kista

________________________________________
From: Timothy Roscoe [troscoe at inf.ethz.ch]
Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2012 13:26
To: Patrik Eklöf
Cc: barrelfish-users at lists.inf.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [Barrelfish-users] Tulip driver

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somewhat out-of-date: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
>