[openbeosnetteam] Re: NVnet driver (nForce network)

Hello Zenja,

I started working on this driver when I got my shuttle last april.  However,
my time was taken up by other things and I still haven't got back around
to it.  Hopefully the GPL implementation should be more helpful to you
than the "opensource" drivers from nvidia that I was trying to work from.

In any case, please count me in as a tester.  With the nvidia driver from
rudolf (recently updated in cvs to 0.07 ;-) ) I was able to take my old
nvidia card out of this box and I look forward to removing my rtl8139
as well.

Also I had some peculiar problems recently.  (after 9 months of everything
being fine.)  I was using the bebits version of the rtl8139 driver and it
seemed to not respond to ARP requests.  I had to switch to my R5 Pro
version of the rtl8139 to get my networking up.  So, I can check this
peculiarity against your implementation as well.

To the general net team - I will get to testing the rtl8139 driver someday.
:-)

Andrew

"Solaja, Zenja" <solaja@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Well, it was bound to happen eventually.  nVidia are not a very
> communicative company when it comes to specs and drivers, even our friends
> in Linux/BSD land have trouble with closed source nvnet drivers (network
> drivers for nForce motherboards) which work with some kernels but not all /
> latest.  Eventually a group of people got together and tried to reverse
> engineer the nvnet driver and rewrite an open source (GPL) clean room
> implementation.
> 
> <link to Linux patch file>
> http://www.hailfinger.org/carldani/linux/patches/forcedeth/
> 
> The driver is called forcedeth (to avoid trademark issues with nvidia)
> 
> Maybe something we can use to get this driver working under BeOS.  Since I'm
> affected (Abit NF7-S nForce2 mobo), I guess I'll give it a shot and see if I
> can port the driver. Wish me luck.

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