NAME

esh — RoadRunner-based HIPPI interfaces device driver

SYNOPSIS

esh* at pci? dev ? function ?

DESCRIPTION

The esh device driver supports the Essential Communications RoadRunner-based HIPPI interfaces. With some modifications, the driver could be made to support the Gigabit Ethernet card based on the same chip.

The driver supports both a normal network interface and a raw HIPPI Framing Protocol (HIPPI-FP) device. The HIPPI-FP interface is accessed via the /dev/eshN/ulpN set of devices. There are 255 available Upper Layer Protocols in FP; these are selectable via the various device entries.

HIPPI is an 800-megabit/sec networking technology which supports extremely large packet sizes. In order to efficiently use this network, the kernel should be configured with extra mbufs, and the default socket buffer size should be increased to at least 192KB, regardless of the expected bandwidth-delay product of the network.

HIPPI ARP is not widely used, and the NetBSD stack does not support it (yet). In order to define the mappings between IP addresses and ifields (the HIPPI MAC addresses), the administrator must make link-layer entries in the routing table using the route(8) command:

route add -interface 129.99.154.101 -llinfo -link esh0:3.0.0.65

MEDIA SELECTION

Media selection is not yet supported for this device.

SEE ALSO

intro(4), pci(4), eshconfig(8), ifconfig(8), route(8)

BUGS

The card must be tuned for proper and efficient DMA operation. The appropriate values vary based on the system. The eshconfig(8) program is used for this.