On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 18:17 +0200, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
There is the issue of mapping PCI roms to free areas, locking (can you use the EEPROM socket on a NIC while it's receiving a frame?).
This depends very well on the card. The PCI standard forbids this anyways. Either the ROM or MEM/IO must be enabled, not both at the same time. Nonetheless, you can make sure it does not happen by unloading the network card module.
Well unloading the driver seems a bit clumsy, and a contradiction really. (unloading a driver to use hardware). I would add the flash ROM functionality to the NIC driver, and have it export an MTD map. The space.c stub implementation would just return EBUSY if the interface is up, but specific drivers could enable interleaved access as they are able.
Regards,
Jeremy