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nForce MCP Network Driver Working On FreeBSD 5.1

Posted by timothy on from the integrated-parts dept.

Dan writes "Quinton Dolan is in the final stages of porting the NVidia Linux nForce MCP network driver to FreeBSD-5.1. He is looking for users/developers with access to this hardware for testing help. The driver currently appears to be stable on his hardware (an MSI K7N420 Pro), although he hasn't done much stress testing, nor does he have access to an nForce2 based motherboard to test."

6 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmmm.... by greenhide · · Score: 2, Insightful

    From his post:
    If you are interested in testing this, email me offline.

    Oh, okay. How do you want me to do that? Use smoke signals over TCP/IP?

    I've never used *BSD, but all the propoganda I've read says that it has a built in Linux emulator. Wouldn't that make it easy to port?

    Also, why bother using a card that requires some special driver? Every run of the mill Ethernet card that I've thrown in a box works just fine without any tweaking or downloading special drivers.

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    1. Re:Hmmmm.... by trippinonbsd · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I've never used *BSD, but all the propoganda I've read says that it has a built in Linux emulator. Wouldn't that make it easy to port?

      FreeBSD has something that is even better than linux emulation. It natively understands and maps linux system calls to their FreeBSD equivilent, which in the earlier days of linux allowed FreeBSD to execute linux binarys faster than linux could. This doesnt make it much easier to port over drivers because drivers are not normal simple executable files.

      Also, why bother using a card that requires some special driver? Every run of the mill Ethernet card that I've thrown in a box works just fine without any tweaking or downloading special drivers.

      Why bother ever using anything onboard with this attitude? No need to use that crazy onboard ide when i could add in a nice 3ware 8 port card...

    2. Re:Hmmmm.... by phoenix_rizzen · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's not emulation, it's binary compatibility. When a Linux binary is loaded, the kernel loads the Linux system call map and uses that instead of the FreeBSD on. IOW, the binary is running natively, without any emulation layer.

      In the early days of FreeBSD 4.x, you could actually run Linux binaries faster on FreeBSD, and in many cases, it would run stabler too. (This is why the CGI in The Matrix was done using Linux apps on FreeBSD servers.)

      But, this only works for userland apps. You can't run Linux kernel modules (drivers) inside the FreeBSD kernel.

    3. Re:Hmmmm.... by endx7 · · Score: 2, Informative

      I've never used *BSD, but all the propoganda I've read says that it has a built in Linux emulator. Wouldn't that make it easy to port?

      It's a driver, and drivers live in kernelspace. The FreeBSD kernel (and others) can only appear to be 'linux' to the userland, and not to stuff that lives inside the kernel.
    4. Re:Hmmmm.... by xA40D · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Also, why bother using a card that requires some special driver? Every run of the mill Ethernet card that I've thrown in a box works just fine without any tweaking or downloading special drivers.

      Well, if you get offered a couple of motherboards with the nForce chipset onboard at a really good price, it'd be nice if you could actually do somethng with them.

      Besides, somebody had to write the drivers for all of them run-of-the-mill cards at some point. Or should we just have one card with one driver? Don't think so. Different chipsets have different features, so it's nice to have drivers written to get the most out of each set.

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  2. Re:NForce2 proprietary? by rakarnik · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yes, he is simply porting the open source wrapper for the Linux binary module to the BSD kernel, as he mentions in the article. Reverse engineering the supplied binary module is prohibited by the license under which it is supplied.

    At this point, we have no idea what chip is used in the NForce2 ethernet. Possible suspects such as AMD8111e and pcnet32 have been tried without success.

    I assume that Nvidia has some kind of licensing agreement that prevents them from releasing specs; otherwise, why in the world would you guard the specs for a damn ethernet card?

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    Genebrew