Hi, On Monday 25 March 2002 12:40, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote: > Well, the core seems to be already separated -- see drivers/net/7990.c. > I haven't yet checked how suitable it is and many front-end drivers use it > already. > > For the I/O ASIC front-end I'm going to check if the ASIC is capable of > mapping the LANCE more sensibly before starting any further work. The > current configuration is a major loss, doubling the CPU's work and I can't > see any reasonable explanation for such a setup. It's been quite some time since I have hacked the declance driver and I don't remember all the details, so take the following with a grain of salt. The 7990 is basically a 16-bit chip in a 32-bit environment, and, AFAIR, uses two different DMA modes to access host memory. One is a 16-bit word-by-word access for the ring descriptors and the other is 8 16-bit-words-bursts for accessing the ring buffers themselves, where the LANCE only generates one target address per burst. The IOASIC is, just as the CPU, only capable of doing 32-bit transfers to/from memory. So 16-bit LANCE accesses are translated into 32-bit IOASIC accesses but a part of the DMA target addresses are generated by the LANCE. This leads to a 16-bit -> 32-bit mapping for the ring descriptors and a 8*16-bit -> 8*32-bit mapping for ring buffers. Very efficient :-(. Greetings, Harald
