Chapter 38. Ethernet Driver Design

Currently, the networking stack only supports ethernet based networking.

The network drivers use a two-layer design. One layer is hardware independent and contains all the stack specific code. The other layer is platform dependent and communicates with the hardware independent layer via a very simple API. In this way, hardware device drivers can actually be used with other stacks, if the same API can be provided by that stack. We designed the drivers this way to encourage the development of other stacks in eCos while allowing re-use of the actual hardware specific code.

More comprehensive documentation of the ethernet device driver and the associated API can be found in the generic ethernet device driver documentation Part XXII in eCos Reference Manual The driver and API is the same as the minimal debug stack used by the RedBoot application. See the RedBoot documentation for further information.