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
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