Call for testers: xe driver patches

Scott Mitchell scott+freebsd at fishballoon.org
Sun Apr 6 09:07:57 PDT 2003


I've made some long overdue updates to the xe (Xircom Ethernet) driver.
This is the first of several updates I have planned.  This one:
	- Fixes the hardware initialisation to eliminate the watchdog timeout
	  every time the card is powered up.
	- Add multicast support (apparently this had never worked).
	- Enable 'early transmit' mode on CE3-class hardware.  This may improve
	  performance, assuming the card can be fed fast enough.
	- Clean up handling of MAC interrupts and statistics in ISR.
	- Some general code cleanup.

The next stage will be to improve the detection and handling of CE2-class
cards, which have also never really worked.  I'm releasing this work in
progress in the hope that people will test it and confirm that I haven't
broken anything -- any card that worked before should continue to work,
hopefully with fewer complaints.

I'll be very grateful to anyone out there who a) runs -CURRENT and b) has a
card supported by xe, who can try out this patch and report back any
breakage to me.  This is most relevant to people with CE3-class cards that
worked already -- these should continue to work.  If you've got a CE2-class
card that didn't work already, it probably still won't, sorry.

See PR kern/50644 for the patch.  It's quite large, so I won't post it to
the mailing list.  http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/50644

The patch is against -CURRENT sources from around noon GMT today.  It might
apply OK against 5.0-RELEASE, although I haven't tried this myself.  Log
messages like:
xe0: transmit underrun: increasing transmit threshold to <blah>
are to be expected.  I'll probably turn these off eventually.

Thanks in advance,

	Scott

-- 
===========================================================================
Scott Mitchell           | PGP Key ID | "Eagles may soar, but weasels
Cambridge, England       | 0x54B171B9 |  don't get sucked into jet engines"
scott at fishballoon.org | 0xAA775B8B |      -- Anon


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