Proposal for changes to network device drivers and network stack (RFC)

[Marcel Moolenaar]

On Sep 5, 2012, at 1:16 PM, George Neville-Neil <gnn at neville-neil.com> wrote:

> One more note.  Can you break the patches down into more bite sized pieces?  They're hard
> to review as is.

Following up finally. Let's focus on the device driver interface.

I renamed the interface implementation from mumble_ddi.h to
if_device.[ch] and put a diff here:
	http://people.freebsd.org/~marcel/Juniper/if_device.diff

To see how it's used and/or how it changes a device driver, look
at a diff to if_em.c here:
	http://people.freebsd.org/~marcel/Juniper/if_em.diff

Some notes:
1.  Yes, there needs a license at the top. It's 2-clause BSD
2.  The function pointers are macros right now. I think it's
    better to have an ops structure and a single function to
    set the ops than a bunch of accessors to set functions.
3.  The code needs to be tidied up.

What I'd like to see is a discussion on the functions themselves.
They're the result of looking at a single driver (or maybe 2
drivers), and as such may not be perfectly generic or logical.

As said before: we'd like to focus on an ABI-stable interface,
but a one based on macros should also be possible.

Sorry for the delay,

-- 
Marcel Moolenaar
marcel at xcllnt.net