2014-02-23 21:09:42

by Gideon D'souza

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Newbie: trying to hack an RTL8101E driver

So I've submitted some patches for some tiny ongoing refactoring.

In the hopes of moving to more _real_ work I've been snooping at the
ethernet drivers. I was especially curious about driver code that is
running for my own hardware.

I found out with lshw that I'm running a Atheros QCA9565 / AR9565
Wireless Network Adapter and a RTL8101E/RTL8102E NIC.

For the atheros drivers after much google-fun I came by this
wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/ath9k and (correct me if I'm
wrong) there isn't a datasheet for this (and generally atheros)
drivers? They've been rev-engg'd ?

I went on the the realtek driver, I found this article on writing a
realtek driver (http://linuxgazette.net/156/jangir.html) I also looked
at Linux Device Drivers, both are pretty old. I also started reading
Documentation/pci/*

**However** I want to learn to write a driver for some hardware I own,
so I can actually see it in action.

The 8139 datasheet seems a lot bigger than the 8101E sheet
(http://realtek.info/pdf/rtl8101e_datasheet_1.2.pdf) and still doesn't
make a lot of sense to me.

Questions:
> As a newbie when it comes to writing software for hardware, is trying to write a driver for my hardware as a exercise doable/possible/good
> Any thing more general purpose I should read about networking and drivers?
> Any good resources other updated resources out there on how to use a datasheet to write a driver?

Thanks so Much
Gideon


2014-02-23 23:30:18

by Ben Hutchings

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Newbie: trying to hack an RTL8101E driver

On Mon, 2014-02-24 at 02:39 +0530, Gideon D'souza wrote:
> So I've submitted some patches for some tiny ongoing refactoring.
>
> In the hopes of moving to more _real_ work I've been snooping at the
> ethernet drivers. I was especially curious about driver code that is
> running for my own hardware.
>
> I found out with lshw that I'm running a Atheros QCA9565 / AR9565
> Wireless Network Adapter and a RTL8101E/RTL8102E NIC.

> For the atheros drivers after much google-fun I came by this
> wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/ath9k and (correct me if I'm
> wrong) there isn't a datasheet for this (and generally atheros)
> drivers? They've been rev-engg'd ?

The ath9k driver is supported by Qualcomm-Atheros - no
reverse-engineering required. I don't know what their policy is for
releasing programming manuals, but it might require an NDA.

> I went on the the realtek driver, I found this article on writing a
> realtek driver (http://linuxgazette.net/156/jangir.html) I also looked
> at Linux Device Drivers, both are pretty old. I also started reading
> Documentation/pci/*
[...]

The Realtek chips (RTL8101E and RTL8102E) are meant to be supported by
r8169 so there is no need for a new driver.

Ben.

--
Ben Hutchings
All the simple programs have been written, and all the good names taken.


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