My client just switched his hardware to a SOM which comes with an on-board E1000 PCIe chip. The RTnet (or Linux) e1000_new driver did not recognize the card so I had to hack the e1000e driver.
Here are the steps (mostly in netdev.c):
- borrow Makefile from RTnet e1000_new;
- junk Ethtool code, disable IPv6;
- short out all of the TCP offloading code -- this is a real time networking stack;
- rip out the Linux stack calls and replace with RTDM if applicable;
- ditto for skb->rtskb;
- kmalloc / kcalloc / kzalloc wrapped for RTDM;
- hash-define rtskb_copy_to_linear_data, rtskb_copy_to_linear_data_offset to some memcpy;
- pre-allocate a pool of 256 rtskbs for RX and initialise it;
- changed IRQ allocation to legacy (not MSI);
- connect to STACK_manager in e1000_open;
- added I/O RT task which is the RTnet bottom half -- waits on a semaphore, calls e1000_clean() and if packets received signals RTnet to process the packets;
- changed the ISR (legacy) to signal the semaphore above is IRQ belongs to the driver;
- removed the QoS stuff;
- removed the VLan stuff;
- disabled multicast code -- RTnet's support for it is flakey;
- disabled set MAC code -- RTnet does not support it;
- disabled skb frags code -- RTnet does not support it;
- disabled change MTU code -- RTnet does not support it;
- disabled power management code -- RTnet does not support it;
- modify RTnet's configure to have "--enable-e1000e".
I spent most of the time trying to compile the hacked code. After I got an IRQ kicking I spent a lot of time making sure the driver is stable and that inserting/removing its module does not thrash the box.
The ported driver (base kernel version is 2.6.29) is here.
-ulianov
