[etherlab-dev] ARM9 (NetX) EtherCAT-enhanced Network Driver

[Thomas Elste]

Hi,

> Yes, it's also included in my running 2.6.22 sources. Can you apply your
> patches to the netx-eth.c from the latest 2.6.20 kernel? I'd like to
> make sure, that the original version is always from the kernel tree.
the patch applies with some hunk offsets and 1 rejection (but thats
only one stray newline). The problem is, I couldn't get the master
running with this patched driver from the mainline kernel.
In fact, I couldn't even get the unpatched ethernet driver with
a vanilla 2.6.20 kernel up and running. The kernel compiles fine, boots
on the board, even the driver gets loaded. But then it's sitting there,
telling me "link is down", when its not :(. Looks like some interrupt
problem.
I think I have to grep the kernel changelogs for >2.6.20 to find out if
this is a known problem and was already fixed. Or I'll have to compare
the kernel from the board support package (the working one) against the
vanilla tree. Maybe its just a configuration issue or another minor
problem. Nevertheless, this probably will take some time.

> Is the NetX ethernet hardware only a part of the Hilscher boards, or is
> there also f. e. a PCI card on the market?
Hilscher is offering a PCI card with the NetX (one is in my PC right
know). It's intended to run as an EtherCAT slave (or some other
RT-Ethernet node ... you have to buy the firmware accordingly). It
comes shipped with a Win32 driver and a loadable (binary) firmware
(which is based on Hilschers own RCX operation system). In addition you
get a so called c-toolkit  ... a bunch of functions for loading the
bootloader and the firmware to the card and to communicate with the
running firmware. I was able to put all this stuff in a .so library
and to write a little PCI driver so the card is usable as an EC slave
in Linux, too. The card (or better it's firmware) has some problems,
though. I've mentioned this on the users list some time ago:
http://lists.etherlab.org/pipermail/etherlab-users/2007-July/000016.html


Best Regards
Thomas