open-source driver question

[sjalex]

Hi, I'm a linux guy and have used netbsd, openbsd, freebsd etc in the past but never tangled with the kernel or drivers outside of Linux.

My mother has fried her ethernet port on her iMac (G4 I think); I recently sent her a silicom USB U2E (usb 2 ethernet) dongle which is evidently not recognized by OS-X. This device works with most linux distros out of the box, and uses the "kaweth" driver which is available on sourceforge. The driver page says it's POSIX compliant which makes me hopeful but I don't know how to proceed.

I'm comfortable with building and installing modules, or even rebuilding the kernel if that's necessary, but I don't know where to start with MacOS. Could someone point me to a resource, or if this driver is already implemented and just needs the VID/PID added to a config file somewhere (or some other trivial step), point me to that?

Thanks for your help.

Stephen

[BSDfan666]

Right... that project isn't a "portable" driver, it's a driver for Linux, a sourceforge project claiming "POSIX compliance" doesn't really mean much for drivers.

Now, FreeBSD and OpenBSD have a kue(4) driver, each man page has a list of products implementing that chipset... Wouldn't it be easier to see if any of them wrote a driver for OS X(And then, hex editing the Product/Vendor ID?)

EDIT: Major score! - http://www.k-micro.us/USB/drivers.htm - Looks like drivers!

USB_Etherb2.sit and Jaton_101_Enet.sit appear to be drivers for the Kawasaki LSI KL5KLUSB101B chipset.

EDIT2: Sorry, the above drivers are for OS <= 9, not OSX.

[sjalex]

Thanks,

After I posted I realized that the makefile referenced a linux source tree which sort of set me straight a little. I had come across the os9 drivers you mentioned below and had the same reaction... oh well on that one.
More generally, though, does MacOS X handle drivers in a similar way to how NetBSD etc etc do? That was my understanding, but I'm not clear on the point. If it does, I think it should be reasonably simple to add the VID/PID into the driver source code (kue, not kaweth) and compile (kernels aren't modular, right, so I need to rebuild kernel?). Does that make sense?

Thanks,

Stephen

Originally Posted by BSDfan666

Right... that project isn't a "portable" driver, it's a driver for Linux, a sourceforge project claiming "POSIX compliance" doesn't really mean much for drivers.

Now, FreeBSD and OpenBSD have a kue(4) driver, each man page has a list of products implementing that chipset... Wouldn't it be easier to see if any of them wrote a driver for OS X(And then, hex editing the Product/Vendor ID?)

EDIT: Major score! - http://www.k-micro.us/USB/drivers.htm - Looks like drivers!

USB_Etherb2.sit and Jaton_101_Enet.sit appear to be drivers for the Kawasaki LSI KL5KLUSB101B chipset.

EDIT2: Sorry, the above drivers are for OS <= 9, not OSX.

[TerryP]

considering the kernel level differences, I doubt it as far as source code goes.