Something Unusual...

A lot has happened since I last posted here. I've dropped Mattise and rejoined the Pedigree project (http://code.google.com/p/pedigree).

The Pedigree project has allowed me to do some pretty crazy things - writing all sorts of code including a fully functional TCP/IP implementation.

And that's what's brought me back here.

I've got a few 3Com 3C90x NICs lying around the place here, and I thought it'd be nice to write a driver for them so I could test out Pedigree on some of the boxes I have around the house. However, I struck a problem very quickly - no emulator for x86 has a 3Com card emulated!

A quick Google search showed me that PearPC had an emulation of one, but because it's a PPC emulator it wasn't useful to me (our PPC port is still a bit behind, unfortunately). PearPC's emulation is licensed under the GPLv2, as is QEMU's (our emulator of choice). So I thought it'd be fun to port it across.

The first hurdle was that PearPC was in C++ and QEMU in C, and their entire interface to the virtual state was different. After an hour or two I'd fixed that up. However, I ran into a slight problem - the emulation was incomplete. So for the past day and a half I've been reading the specification for the card and updating my emulation code, while also updating my own driver.

So I've been working on a driver for (and an emulation of) this NIC, which has been a huge challenge and all up, a lot of fun!

It's an amazing feeling when you successfully create and close your first TCP connection. You can imagine how much more incredible it is when you watch "lynx" (the text-based browser) running through your NIC driver, controlling your emulated NIC, do a full request and print the page.

I will be submitting the 3C90x emulation as soon as it's more complete, cleaned up a bit, and most importantly - tested!