Re: Newbie: trying to hack an RTL8101E driver

[Ben Hutchings]

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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