Re: Ethernet over SPI driver for ENC424J600

[John Dallaway <john at dallaway dot org dot uk>]

Hi Sergei

Sergei Gavrikov wrote:

> Hello guys, may be I miss something but I thought that any Ethernet
> eCos driver is enough abstract thing to manage ETH L2 and that does
> not depend (well, depends a bit) on any next layer, e.g., a TCP/IP
> implementation (RedBoot TCP/IP, *BSD, lwIP* stacks) even if the driver
> uses another channel (SPI) to get a memory access to MAC buffers.  I
> talk about generic io/eth/* stuff and..., well some kind of a future
> devs/eth/mc/spi/* eth_drv_.* routines, for example.

In theory, of course, you are correct. The network abstractions should
ensure compatibility between any ethernet device driver and any TCP/IP
stack. But in practice, testing can reveal all manner of issues which
no-one was expecting.

We have a port of the lwIP 1.3.1 stack in development and it would
certainly be useful to test new ethernet drivers against this stack.
However, I am _not_ suggesting that the other stacks should now be
neglected.

John Dallaway