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Any device driver writers here

R

RU482

Lifer
I am working with a product that used an Agere Et-1310 ethernet chipset. For the imaging process, I need a working 16-bit ODI driver (.com). The driver supplied by the manufacturer does not work (machine locks up when the boot disk loads the driver). Agere (no LSI) has no interest in helping or providing an updated driver.

Just curious if it is even possible to get someone to write a new driver for this device.
If so, any idea what it would cost?

Thanks if anyone has any insight.

PS: this isn't a personal project, but rather a support project for a product that will have an annual volume of 1-2000 units.
 
Is it possible the floppy is simply damaged and the file corrupt? Floppies are notorious for that. Better off getting a replacement driver than writing your own. The problem isn't so much how to write a driver as it is knowing the complete specs of the hardware inside and out and handling every single task, knowing IO addresses and memory addresses, interrupt numbers, the different status bits of each register, etc.

That said writing a MS-DOS driver is easy, you just write code like any other MS-DOS code that is loaded as a TSR stub and hooking the hardware interrupt vector that corresponds to the physical IRQ to call the TSR stub. No paging or IORPs or asynchronous IO or anything tricky to deal with.

The BIOS, both on the PC and the card itself, negotiate and set the ISA/PCI memory mapping, program the interrupt controller, and handle all the complicated stuff at POST time.

Again better off just trying another disk or researching a compatible driver, or finally, choosing a different, perhaps more generic, Ethernet chipset. If the company is unwilling to assist in providing a driver, I doubt very much they will be helpful with the task of providing proprietary programing specs that will be essential to writing a driver in a meaningful amount of time.
 
we have tried numerous floppies, even flash drives, had the vendor resend the file, ect...same results

Unfortunately, the ethernet controller is not all that common. About the only other device I could find that used the Agere ET-1310 ethernet controller was a Rosewill PCI-e card. The driver provided on the Rosewill site is the same driver the our hardware manufacturer provided. To muddy the water even more, in the last week, the card disappeared from the Rosewill website.
 
So the file isn't corrupt, just the machine is locking up on driver load...

Possible memory or IO address conflict in the CONFIG.SYS or MSCDEX settings, HMA compatibility if loading high, incorrect jumper settings on the card, etc?

Try loading nothing BUT the network card driver in a completely clean MS-DOS boot environment with the default driver settings (ie: no switches)

Also be weary of BIOS settings relating to IRQ management, PnP, etc.
 
A couple of the bsds have drivers for this chipset. Seems to have originated in dfly. Code's nice and free (if it can be adapted for your needs) and they might have some documentation they could give you.
 
If this is just for imaging of the machines I would definitely stop f'ing with DOS crap and look at Linux or BSDs and using something like partimage. Probably a BSD since a quick Google search doesn't look to promising for getting that card working in Linux either.
 
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