Actually, there *was* a driver (unencumbered by the author signing NDAs)
almost ready to go over a year ago. Jason specifically asked me to not commit
it. I've been (perhasp overly) respectful of that since then. In the mean
time, the author has lost interest in working on this h/w, but others should
feel free to swipe the current instantiation from OpenBSD and DTRT if their
timer interrupt says "Intel releasing Jason has taken too long".

It's also possibly true that the current 'lead' driver resident in FreeBSD
(which is done by an Intel engineer, actually: Prafulla Deuskar
<pdeuskar@FreeBSD.ORG>), could be ported for NetBSD. The trouble with this
driver is that it appears to be a port from Linux and cleaning it up to be
acceptable for the different platforms that NetBSD has might require more time
investment than he or Intel is willing to make.

-matt


On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, Darren Reed wrote:

> 
> There's one more thing to say on this and I base this on something
> said some time ago about someone besides Jason having a working
> Intel GigE driver.  If that's not true then the rest of this is crap...
> 
> Given it has taken ~6 months for nothing to happen with paperwork on
> the Intel front, I believe we should adopt an attitude of "we have no
> idea when they will do their side of things and we can't wait forever."
> 
> It would be handy if there was a driver for it already in the tree for
> fred, for starters.
> 
> So what I'm saying is, if there is an Intel GigE driver we can import
> into the tree, now and not have to worry about NDA's then we should do
> so.  I don't think we should be spending more months or years waiting
> for Intel to make up their minds.
> 
> They may come back tomorrow (cool!) or they may come back in 12 months
> (not cool).  In either case, it should be a relatively trivial job of
> replacing one driver with another (hopefully nobody will mind) and in
> the meantime, we have a driver for something which otherwise we don't.
> 
> I think it would be a great shame if the only reason we have this
> conversation, again, in 6 months, is because there's been no movement
> at Fort Intel.
> 
> Darren
>