Summary of changes in the 9.x release: The -n switch works again. It was broken in the 8.x release. Bugs fixed: ibmtoken, others. Versions: If you already have an older packet driver, you may wish to upgrade. You should base this decision on the contents of the "Changes..." section below. The major version (currently 9) goes up with every release. The minor version (.x, different for every driver) goes up with every significant change in the device dependent part. Some drivers, at&t, 3c507, 3c523, ncret105, ubnicps2, ni5210, and ni9210, all depend on 82586.asm, so they have a subminor version number which is the version of 82586.asm. Some drivers, hppclan, ne1000, ne2000, 3c503, and wd8003e, all depend on 8390.asm, so they have a subminor version number which is the version of 8390.asm. If the minor version hasn't changed, then chances are very good that no significant bugs have been introduced. Sometimes the file is changed without changing the version number. This is done only when an identical change is made to all drivers to fix a bug that appears in every driver. 3C501.ASM version equ 2 3C503.ASM version equ 4 3C505.ASM version equ 1 3C507.ASM version equ 0 3C523.ASM version equ 1 82586.ASM i82586_version equ 2 ARCNET.ASM version equ 0 AR450.ASM version equ 0 AT&T.ASM version equ 1 GENERIC.ASM version equ 0 IPXPKT.ASM version equ 2 NCRET105.ASM version equ 0 ISOLAN.ASM version equ 1 LOCALTLK.ASM version equ 2 NB.ASM version equ 3 NI5010.ASM version equ 2 NE2000.ASM version equ 4 NI6510.ASM version equ 1 NI5210.ASM version equ 2 NTI16.ASM version equ 0 NI9210.ASM version equ 0 SLIP8250.ASM version equ 5 PKTADDR.ASM version equ 1 PKTALL.ASM version equ 0 PKTCHK.ASM version equ 1 PKTMODE.ASM version equ 1 PKTMULTI.ASM version equ 0 PKTRING.ASM version equ 0 PKTSEND.ASM version equ 1 PKTSTAT.ASM version equ 1 DE600.ASM version equ 0 UBNICPC.ASM version equ 1 TRACE.ASM version equ 0 8390.ASM dp8390_version equ 0 WD8003E.ASM version equ 7 NE1000.ASM version equ 5 UBNICPS2.ASM version equ 1 DEPCA.ASM version equ 0 HPPCLAN.ASM version equ 0 NE2.ASM version equ 5 EXPRESS.ASM version equ 4 Back issues: Back issues of the packet drivers are available on sun.soe.clarkson.edu. See HOWTOGET.IT for information on accessing sun.soe. Changes from version 8.x to 9.x of the drivers: Some 8.x drivers complained about int_no needing to be greater than 2. Using the -n switch caused the driver to go deaf. The set_address() routine was broken. The set_rcv_mode() routine no longer returns an error if the requested mode is the same as the current mode. Some NE1000 manufacturers use invalid manufacturer codes in their Ethernet addresses. They are invalid because the multicast bit is set. The driver will reset the bit and whine at you about it. The wd8003e usage message didn't include the -o switch. The error message for non-responding memory mentioned IO addresses wrongly. Brian Fisher send in code for the tiara driver to read the POS registers. Pktaddr, pktmode, and pktstat used to use a completely bogus packet type of length 8. That confused Joe Doupnik's dis_pkt (packet driver over NDIS driver) converter. I changed it to use a bogus type of length 2. Mark Power found a few bugs in the ibmtoken driver. Summary of changes in the 8.x release: New drivers: HP Ethertwist, 3Com EtherLink Plus, UB NIC/PS2, ARLAN 450, NCR ET-105, D-Link DE-600, Mitel Express, NE/2, DEPCA, BICC Isolink (4110-2/3) (buggy). Bugs fixed: pktchk, 3c523, ibmtoken, tiara, ne2000, ubnicpc. All class 1 drivers can also act as class 11 drivers. Changes from version 7.x to 8.x of the drivers: Russell Nelson wrote an HP Ethertwist driver. This covers the HP27245 HP27250 HP27247 but not the HP27246 (MCA). We could not get the latter driver working by release time. Russell Nelson wrote a 3Com EtherLink Plus (3c507), UB NIC/PS2 driver, ARLAN 450 driver, and NCR ET-105 driver. Glenn Talbott suggested that the hardware be terminated after the interrupt was masked off, to avoid spurious interrupts during the termination process. D-Link donated a DE-600 driver. Dave Price wrote a Mitel Express (ISDN) packet driver. Eric Henderson wrote a NE/2 packet driver. Sylvan Butler fixed two bugs in ubnicpc. The handle check on get_address isn't necessary, and so was removed. The 1.09 spec says that it's required, but that will be removed in the 1.10 spec, as I'm told. Doug Smith wrote a DEPCA packet driver, and Russell Nelson finished it off. Russell Nelson and Tobias Reber fixed the 3c523 driver (yay!). Renamed ubnic to ubnicpc to make it clearer which adapter it's for. Reinhard Strebler added code to wd8003e to read the POS registers prior to parsing the arguments. John A. Murphy fixed a problem in the 8390 driver whereby it could lose the interrupt on an incoming packet. Gregory T Small found a bug in the packet interrupt verification (tail.asm). Bill Rust rewrote the 8259a interrupt acknowledgement code to use specific EOIs, which gets around the C&T bug (see 8259.not). There is a new helper file called printnum.asm, that prints a label, then a dword number in hex, then in decimal. There is a new helper file called verifypi.asm, that verifies that a packet driver exists at the given interrupt. A few messages were reworded for more clarity. The machine type (ISA versus MCA) is now determined before the call to parse_args. This is so that MCA drivers can read the POS registers to supply defaults. The set_rcv_mode function will only change the receive mode if only one handle is open. This prevents Novell and KA9Q users from running a netwatcher, which confuses both of them. All drivers for boards using the 82586 (see Versions above) have had code added to compensate for some bugs in the 82586. Reinhard Strebler found a serious bug in the 82586 where it didn't wait for the results of a command properly. This fixes the bogus TDR reports. All drivers for boards using the 8390 (see Versions above) have had the 8390-specific code consolidated into a single file. Eric Henderson and Colin Cook's class 11 changes have been incorporated. They let a single driver appear as multiple-class drivers. Russell Nelson modified their code so that packet watchers still get all packets. Don Provan and Jan Engvald fixed a bug in the -n switch handling. When -n is used, DIX Ethernet (aka Ethernet II aka Blue Book Ethernet) frames shouldn't be passed on as-is. Don's fix dropped them, Jan's converted them to 8138 packets. Jan's was a better idea. The 3c503 driver has some code added to use the board in I/O-mapped mode. Unfortunately, there wasn't time to get it working. It'll have to wait for the next release. The helper file movemem.asm will use 386 memory move instructions. The helper file getnum.asm didn't always reject invalid digits. Brian Fisher fixed ibmtoken to flush the RIF cache using a LRU algorithm. Russell Nelson cleaned up the multicast handling in the ni6510 driver. Russell Nelson worked on pktsend: didn't properly check for trashed memory on machines with less than 640K. Also prints the address of the trashed memory. It also now prints 'R' when a packet is received, and 'T' when a packet is transmitted. Denis DeLaroca changed the way the 16550A is detected in slip8250.asm. The tiara packet driver didn't work properly with the -n switch. The ne2000 packet driver didn't work properly with the -n switch. Russell Nelson cleaned up trace internally, no difference to the user. John Baird wrote some ipxpkt documentation. Changes from version 6.0 to 7.0 of the drivers: Summary: New drivers: UB PC/NIC, LocalTalk, Tiara, NTI. Bugs fixed: 3c505, 3c503, wd8003e, nb, ne1000. Bug found but not fixed: 3c523. *** The 3c523 driver is semi-broken.*** If you run the 5.x release of the 3c523 driver (3c523_5), terminate it, then run the 7.x release (3c523), it will work. This need only be done once after powering-up the computer. This will be fixed in the next release. Drew Perkins made a bunch of changes: pktsend now takes a length argument, (-l) so that you may send packets of a given length with unknown contents. pktsend now skips blanks between the -f switch and the filename. pktsend now takes a packet count argument (-n) which is the count of packets to send between keypresses. pktsend now takes a switch to be quiet (-q). pktsend now takes a switch (-a) to send using as_send_pkt, for testing of asychronous packet sending. getnum now parses very large numbers correctly. wd8003d now has 16 bit support for the WD8013EBT card. Also "high performance" changes to WD8003E.ASM and HEAD.ASM. fixed hangs or other errors caused by incorrect function in some 8259 clone ICs. enabled slave interrupts on the master 8259. Apparently some early IBM BIOSes didn't do this. John Mann submitted some code to delay the etopen and convert between Novell's pseudo IEEE 802.3 packets and Ethernet packets. Jan Engvald made Mann's changes optional by adding two switches. The -d switch delays the initialization, and the -n switch converts Novell packets. The n option converts the type 8137 packets from the BYU packet driver IPX into Novell ISO-like packets. The d option delays initialization until it gets the first call. Together these options make it very easy to run packet drivers in a PROM booted LAN PC. Jan Engvald improved the 3c501 and ni5010 drivers, which were only implemented to look at the two bytes in the type field, and for n-option to work one has to look at at least 4 bytes. Jan Engvald implemented Stop Function (8) that clears in use flags of all handles. See README.BOT for more details. Jan Engvald found and fixed a few coding errors in occupied.asm, tail.asm and wd8003e.asm. John Mann improved the ne1000 driver. It didn't handle large Ethernet packets (between 1454 and 1472 bytes of data (total packet size 1496 and 1514 bytes). He also changed a few hard-coded numbers into symbols. Katie Stevens wrote a LocalTalk driver. Katie Stevens added code to head.asm to prevent snarfing a hardware interrupt if the packet driver doesn't use one. Anto Prijosoesilo, who fixed a bug related to DMA in the ni6510 driver. Paul Kranenburg added routing support to use Novell bridges (netwide broadcasting and hacks to find out about IPX net addresses). Paul Kranenburg added support for IPX node address with less than 6 significant bytes. (through the `-n ' command line option). Paul Kranenburg added auxiliary program (ipxstat.c) to display route table information and a couple of other statistics (define STAT when compiling the driver to use this option) John Breeden found a bug in the AT&T driver where it didn't report the type of an unknown card correctly. He also added a new card to the list of AT&T cards (StarLAN-10 R3). Russell Nelson fixed a problem in dump.exe where it reported the names of function numbers >=20 incorrectly. Steve Wallace added a hack to let the packet drivers run under Windows. This is not to be construed with the proper solution, which is to write a TCP/IP package for Windows. This hack is enabled only when you use the '-w' switch. Russell Nelson added promiscuous mode to the ni5010 driver. Martin Knoblauch found that the ni5010 driver was resetting the receive mode after each packet was received. Russell Nelson added code to 82586.asm to allow runts to be upcalled in mode 6 (promiscuous mode). Eric Henderson added Carl Beame's fix to his ne1000 driver, and he also copied the receive mode support from the wd8003e driver. Reinhard Strebler added a success message to termin.asm, and an error return to the f_terminate call. Changes from version 5.0 to 6.0 of the drivers: Summary: New drivers: ni6510, at&t, arcnet, ipxpkt, nb, ne2000. New utilities: pktmulti, pktsend, pktstat. Bugs fixed: 3c505, 3c503, wd8003e. Carl Beame found a bug in his National 8390 drivers which was also present in the drivers based on the 3c503. To wit, when the buffers overflowed, there was a chance that there were no buffers present. Trying to read one of these buffers would cause a crash. This affects the 3c503, wd8003e, and ne2000 drivers. James A. Harvey fixed a problem in the first beta test release that caused some machines to incorrectly determine the number of interrupts, and fixed the lockup problem in the 3c503. Russell Nelson changed the skeleton to enable compliance with version 1.09 of the packet driver spec. Russell Nelson wrote the following drivers: ni6510, at&t, and arcnet. Russell Nelson wrote the following utilities pktmulti, pktsend, pktstat. The following drivers now implement promiscuous mode: 3c501, 3c523, ni9210, ni5210, at&t, ni6510, wd8003e. Jan Engvald enhanced HEAD.ASM to properly sense the second 8259a. Denis DeLaroca fixed the 16550a support in slip8250.asm. Glen Marianko's ROMREL program is now included for Novell users. All of the programs may be assembled with Borland or Microsoft (5.1) products. Some of the programs may be assembled with Microsoft v4.0 products. The set_address function refused to change the address if there was one or more handles open. One handle is allowable. The 3c501 driver now sends large broadcast packets (i.e. BOOTP) correctly. The routine get_multicast_list has been obsoleted by doing the same function totally within HEAD.ASM The terminate routine now gets called on the f_terminate calls. f_terminate now checks for any outstanding handles before terminating. The parameters are now printed separately from being parsed. This is to let programs determine the parameters dynamically. The 3c503 driver was enabling interrupts when it shouldn't have. Some drivers would return a parameter error if some of the parameters weren't specified. The bus type in 82586-based drivers is now a variable rather than an equate. The 82586-based drivers now have multicast partially implemented. The 3c523 driver reads the POS registers before parsing the parameters. The 82586-based drivers disable interrupts prior to being initialized. Some of these drivers would generate spurious interrupt, which caused crashes when interrupt 2 was used. The BIOS enables interrupt 2 automatically. The 82586-based drivers now sense the amount of memory automatically, even though they still only use 8K. This means no problems with 386 memory mappers. The maximum number of handles was increased from 8 to 10 (MAX_HANDLE). The .286 directive was removed from DEFS.ASM so that no 286 code accidentally slips in. The function dispatch routine in HEAD.ASM was changed for version 1.09 of the PDS. As promised in the version 4.x notes, the unique handle creation code went away. If a driver sets int_no to zero, the timer interrupt won't get masked off. :-) Dave Horne changed the 3c503 driver into a ne2000 driver. Dave Horne changed the way upcalls are called so that the upcall handler can exit using either a far return, or an iret. David E. Johnson fixed the 3c505 driver. Joe Doupnik improved HEAD.ASM by adding some comments and he brought it closer into compliance with the PDS. He also changed access_type so that it would let driver users ask for all packets even though other driver users were asking for some packets. Joe Doupnik added packet driver support to PC/IP's netwatch. Many useful subroutines were split out into separate files, rather than being duplicated in every program that used them. These routines are in the public domain. The various packet driver clients (pkt*.com) were changed to use these separate files. They also now use a macro to call the packet driver. They also report any and all errors that may occur. They also ask the driver for driver_info, then uses it to access_type. The packet receive tester, pktall, test to see if the driver is writing too much or too little, or in memory that it doesn't own. SLIP8250 now requires a command-line switch to enable hardware handshake. TAIL.ASM now prints the arcnet address, if the driver is an arcnet driver. Jan Engvald improved the wd8003e driver: The wd8003e driver now supports the E EBT EB ET/A and E/A boards. The wd8003e memory base default was 0xc400 and is now 0xd000. The wd8003e driver supports multicast modes. The wd8003e driver has a better test for occupied memory, and a switch to disable the occupied memory test in case it loses. Changes from version 4.0 to 5.0 of the drivers: Summary: New: 3c505, ne1000, ni9210, ibmtoken. Bugs fixed: all drivers. Krishnan Gopalan and Gregg Stefancik wrote a packet driver for the 3c505. Brian Fisher wrote an "Ethernet" packet driver for the IBM Token Ring Adapter. Eric Henderson wrote a packet driver for Novell's NE1000. Russell Nelson modified ni5210 to be a ni9210 driver. This entailed some changes in 82586.asm. Russell Nelson wrote pktmode, a utility to set the receive mode. Russell Nelson wrote pktaddr, a utility to set the Ethernet address. Russell Nelson wrote pktall, a utility to help debug packet reception. Trace.com is a little bit more helpful about how to run it. Vance Morrison added starlan support to the wd8003e driver. Eric Henderson improved it. Deborah Swanberg noticed that the 3c503 driver didn't timeout properly if there was a failure to complete a transmit. The set_address routine in the device dependent files now returns the address length as it should have. Head.asm now keeps a copy of the hardware address set by set_address. This is used by f_get_address to return the current address. The device dependent get_address routine always returns the PROM address. The set_rcv_mode routine didn't work. Not at all. The access_type routine returns more appropriate errors. The f_get_address routine wasn't passing the right address length to get_address. Tail.asm now checks for extra parameters on the end of the line. Dan Lanciani added changes to ni5210 version 4.2 to increase reliability. It works for him. Unfortunately, I have had reports from other people that it breaks Novell. So, these changes are in "if DAN" conditional assembly. If your Novell connection gets dropped, try reassembling ni5210 after setting "DAN equ 0" in 82586.asm Packet drivers for the NE2000 and UB NIC PC/2 are in the works, but don't hold your breath. A packet driver for the Xircom pocket Ethernet adapter is undergoing testing. Jan Engvald found and fixed a bug in the wd8003e memory presence check. Changes from version 3.0 to 4.0 of the drivers: Russell Nelson added code to enable interrupts in the body of the packet driver. Denis DeLaRoca added hardware handshake to the SLIP8250 driver. John Grover optimized the SLIP8250 driver to work at 38.4 Kbps. Russell Nelson added some sanity checking to slip8250 to warn the user about possible incorrect parameters. Bob Clements added a switch to select thick or thin Ethernet in the 3c503. Russell Nelson found a minor bug in NI5210 that caused it to fail to initialize sometimes. Thanks to everyone who reported it. Dan Lanciani found a race condition in the 80586 code common to the NI5210 and 3c523 drivers. Russell Nelson split out the 82586 code from the NI5210 and 3c523 drivers into a single file. Russell Nelson added memory address checking to NI5210. Glen M. Marianko devised a method for determining the memory size of the NI5210 automagically. Jan Engvald enhanced the packet driver code for Western Digital Ethernet cards to handle the micro channel version WD8003ET/A. Jan Engvald enhanced TAIL.ASM to return error codes to DOS. Jan Engvald enhanced HEAD.ASM to be aware of running on a MicroChannel bus. Rainer Toebbicke wrote the BICC Data Networks' ISOLAN 4110 ethernet driver. Russell Nelson wrote the packet driver tracer and dumper (trace.com and dump.exe). Russell Nelson added support for set_rcv_mode, get_rcv_mode, set_multicast_list, and get_multicast_list to the infrastructure. It is up to the individuals who wrote the individual drivers to add the device-dependent support. Changes from version 2.0 to 3.0 of the drivers: GNU General Public License adopted. The restriction on commercial usage prevented some companies from distributing the packet drivers. This is entirely my idea, so send any comments to nelson@clutx.clarkson.edu. 3c523 driver added, thanks to Dan Lanciani (ddl@harvard.edu). Gregg Stefanik (wstef@eng.clemson.edu) is working on a 3c505 driver. Don't bug him about it unless you're willing to be a alpha tester. User documentation added (DRIVERS.DOC). Brad Clements (no relation to Bob Clements) fixed the NI5210 driver so that it will work with a MTU of 1500. The NI5210 now checks for shorts and opens before it starts up, thanks to Brad. All memory-mapped packet drivers now check the packet length in send_pkt to ensure that too-long packets get trapped. All packet drivers will work with MTUs of 1500 (plus 14 bytes of Ethernet header). Deborah Swanberg noticed that attach_type was returning NO_CLASS when it meant to return NO_TYPE. She also noted that packet drivers weren't returning unique handles. This is only a problem with Phil Karn's code, as his code directs *every* packet driver to the same receiver routine. With non-unique handles, it was impossible to tell which packet driver was upcalling the receiver. Unique handles are now generated, based on the starting segment of the driver. The latest version of Karn's code uses different receiver routines, so the code to implement this will eventually go away. Tail.asm now prints the Ethernet address of the interface (if it is an Ethernet class device) Micom has sold Interlan, and Racal has bought it, so perhaps the NI5210 is now the Racal-Interlan NI5210? If anyone is interested in using the Zenith Z-100 with a SLIP packet driver, please send me (Russell Nelson) mail. I have it partially written, but will probably never use it myself. WD8003E and 3c503 sped up slightly -- stole movemem from NI5210. Changes from version 3 to 2.0 of the drivers: Version numbering now changed. If the skeleton changes, the major version is incremented and all the minor versions are reset to zero. Support for version 1.08 of the packet driver spec included. Bob Clements' 3c503 driver added. See README.503. Some comments improved. BAD_COMMAND checking code fixed. cld instructions added to ensure that DF=0. NI5210 sped up slightly -- look at movemem in ni5210.asm for an especially fast routine to move memory around. Changes from version 2 to 3 of the drivers: SLIP8250 can now be one of three classes: SLIP, AX.25, and KISS. Tail.asm now checks for a packet driver already at the given interrupt. Tail.asm now echoes its arguments in hex and decimal. Tail.asm will close stdout so that a file handle won't be used up in case the user redirects stdout to NUL. Head.asm now supports driver termination. Termin.com added to terminate a driver. Head.asm now does a stack swap to avoid pushing too many things when interrupting MS-LOSS. Changes from version 1 to 2 of the drivers: !! Arguments are now in decimal by default !! Use a 0x prefix for hex. DEFS.ASM created. The loadport macro improved. SLIP8250 driver added, thanks for a C version from Phil Karn. I've tried to put some 16550 support in, but I don't have one to test it with. The documentation insists the TBRE goes low when the transmit buffer is not empty, while it makes sense for it to stay high while the buffer is not full. I suspect the documentation is wrong. NI5010 driver added, thanks for a C version from Bill Doster. WD8003 driver added, by Bob Clements. Loadport macro added to WD8003 driver by Russell Nelson. Numeric arguments may now be specified in octal, decimal or hex, using the C notation. Numeric arguments can now use up to 32 bits. Source files reformatted.