It's not clear to me that Jonathon's driver is really unencumbered. He had
access to Intel docs via Cisco. It's not clear to me how he was then
authorized to release if_gx.

Anyway, as I said, I've lost interest in the chip itself. It's too hard to try
and work separate from Intel. If they want to help- that's actually great, I
guess! If not, they make it too difficult to use their h/w and still leave
room for an Open Source driver. I've given up on that route myself. It's
*sooo* much nicer dealing with companies like Sundance or LSI-Logic- they
simply just give you information and you can happily support their products.

-matt


On Thu, 14 Mar 2002, Jonathan Stone wrote:

> 
> >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.
> 
> And then there's the *third* FreeBSD driver, if_gx.c by Jonathan
> Lemon. That driver addresses most of the design issues Jason raised
> with your driver (some of which I know have been fixed since).  The
> rxeof and tx routines in if_gx.c look awfully like some of Bill Paul's
> FreeBSD drivers, which have already been bus-dma-ified and imported
> into NetBSD.
> 
> Intel's stance on licensing drivers for their gig-E cards looks just
> plain silly, and it can only be hurting them in the marketplace.
> Whether they see it that way or not is another story, though :).
>