Hackable GbE Controller?

Hello,

I was just wondering if there are any GbE controllers out there that do enough of their processing in the driver (or have sufficient control knobs available) that we can experiment with nonstandard collision algorithms, or in any case, as much of frame processing as possible? The Intel controllers I've looked at (8254x) seem to handle most of the actual Ethernet processing in hardware, as you'd expect, leaving the driver to do little more than manage buffers and statistics. We'd like to play around at a lower level. Does anyone have any suggestions? Maybe it's just too much to ask at these speeds?

Thanks!

PS The e-mail address is just a spam trap, so if possible please reply to the group.

Reply to
Medgya
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I don't know whether the accton tigon I and II and broadcom tigon III cards will let you go quite that far, but I did notice they have replaceable firmware. The documentation and sample firmwares were available from accton but apparently not any more, but a little searching should turn up some copies.

Reply to
jpd

^^^^^^^^ You mean Alteon?

I presume this would be at 100BT speeds since there is so very little half-duplex GbE... I wonder what the folks who came-up with BLAM to deal with capature effect used for their testing?

rick jones

Reply to
Rick Jones

Err, yes. Apologies.

Reply to
jpd

We did it all in simulation; the project never got far enough to build actual hardware. If we were doing it today, I would build the state-machine in an FPGA for testing.

-- Rich Seifert Networks and Communications Consulting 21885 Bear Creek Way (408) 395-5700 Los Gatos, CA 95033 (408) 228-0803 FAX

Send replies to: usenet at richseifert dot com

Reply to
Rich Seifert

Many thanks for the feedback. I'll poke around and see what I can lay my hands on!

Reply to
Medgya

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