[ECOS] Ethernet driver (specifically SMSC 91Cxxx) questions...

["Andy Jackson" <andy at grapevinetech dot co dot uk>]

Hi,

I have recently been porting the 91Cxxx driver to our LPC2294/SMSC91C111 
based hardware and have some questions:

1. Has anyone previously used the 32-bit data access mode in the driver? I 
seem to have had to rewrite chunks of it in order to get it to work and I 
don't know if its a quirk of our hardware or a general problem. If its that 
latter, then I'll submit a patch.

2.  From the Generic Ethernet Driver documentation, the xxx_start functions 
role is:

This function is called, perhaps much later than system initialization time, 
when the system (an application) is ready for the interface to become 
active. The purpose of this function is to set up the hardware interface to 
start accepting packets from the network and be able to send packets out. 
The receiver hardware should not be enabled prior to this call.

A quick look through some of the drivers suggests that most use this 
function to reset the controller, phy etc, which is fine. However, I've 
noticed that during network initialisation (FreeBSD stack) this gets called 
three times or more. Each call results in the SMSC 91C111 dropping the link 
and going through an auto-negotiation cycle after which it will start 
receiving packets again and so may have to dispose of partially processed 
data which can potentially cause problems and anyway slows the whole booting 
process.

Is this the intended behavior?

Thanks for any help,

   Andy..


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