PCnet / FAST III

General discussion about Visopsys.
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ronaldlees
Posts: 120
Joined: Tue May 20, 2014 5:19 pm

Re: PCnet / FAST III

Post by ronaldlees »

I've put my descriptions of visopsys debugging experiments on an outside page, so as not to clog up the forum:

https://myprogrammingmiscellany.wordpress.com/

On that page I've described a QEMU, GDB, Emacs debugging chain, applied to Visopsys. The Emacs debugging is much prettier, with its windows for threads, locals, registers, breakpoints, memory, stack, etc.
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doga-1494
Posts: 46
Joined: Fri Jul 22, 2011 3:53 pm

Re: PCnet / FAST III

Post by doga-1494 »

i don't know what PCnet & FAST III is exactly.
i'm gonna google it and try to get web page and show it in notepad at least. then i can re-start working on web browser
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ronaldlees
Posts: 120
Joined: Tue May 20, 2014 5:19 pm

Re: PCnet / FAST III

Post by ronaldlees »

doga-1494 wrote:i don't know what PCnet & FAST III is exactly.
i'm gonna google it and try to get web page and show it in notepad at least. then i can re-start working on web browser
Hi doga-1494

Sorry I haven't gotten back to you. I've been spending a lot of time on other forums (latest thing for me is Rust development).

Anyway - Lance is the oldest AMD ethernet controller family, put out in 1985. It used the AMD7990 controller chip. The PCNet family used approximately the same architecture, but in a more integrated design, and used chips like AM79c961 (PCNet-ISA) and AM79c971 (PCNet-FAST). Then there were several incantations of FAST (I, II, III). So - it's the family the original AM7990 started, with improved chips in the PCNet series, and (I think) some others as well.

I'm sure that Andy can give you a better idea about it, and maybe he can correct me if I have the lineage wrong in some way.

Great idea about the browser. That means you'll either build out a TCP/IP stack, or make a dedicated piece of software built around the driver. Which are you thinking about? Or something different? Hey - you could port Rust over to VisOpSys and build your browser with it! LOL. Mozilla is probably going to use Rust for their next gen browser families ( see https://programmingmiscellany.wordpress.com ). It's a C/C++ like language, and just as fast, but with guards against memory mismanagement. Theoretically.

You could just build up a little network code tightly wrapped to the NIC driver, AKA nginx style. If you layered your browser code correctly, you could switch over to the full blown TCP/IP stack when it became available.



-Ron
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