Standalone network calls

Ben,

During the work to bring FreeBSD support in U-Boot we came accross a need for standalone network operations to send and receive an ethernet frame. In short, the approach is to have a native FreeBSD loader running on top of U-Boot as a standalone app. U-Boot's networking however, is pretty self-contained and, in particular, does not have a 'receive' primitive that would directly suit such purposes.

Please have a look at the attached patch and let me hear your comments about this direction in general and regarding these changes in particular. The included code actually works - we have a prototype FreeBSD loader running successfully on U-Boot extended in this fashion:

* eth_send() and eth_receive() are exported via the jump table and consumed by the FreeBSD loader

* the loader implements all TCP/IP and related protocols that it requires, so would be using U-Boot networking calls only as elementary send/receive

Beside the newly introduced eth_receive() one needs to export eth_{send,init,halt} too, and some other calls, but they can just be used without changes.

Any comments or suggestions welcome.

kind regards,
Rafal
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: u-boot-rcv.diff
Url: http://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/attachments/20070315/3a1691a7/attachment.txt

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

DENX Software Engineering GmbH, HRB 165235 Munich, CEO: Wolfgang Denk
Office:  Kirchenstr. 5,       D-82194 Groebenzell,            Germany
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd at denx.de
NOTE: The  Most  Fundamental  Particles  in  This  Product  Are  Held
Together  by  a  "Gluing" Force About Which Little is Currently Known
and Whose Adhesive Power Can Therefore Not Be Permanently Guaranteed.

Rafal,

<snip>

This looks pretty cool. Please do me a favor and re-send with proper sign-off. After you do so, I'll put it in the u-boot-net branch.

The command to use is 'git format-patch'

regards,
Ben