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
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.