golds@rlgvax.UUCP (Rich Goldschmidt) (02/25/88)
How do others out there support the many different ethernet boards for PCs. Sun's PC-NFS does not support any of the "smart" boards, comes with its own driver for each board, and tough luck for any network application which would like to coexist (unless you build it with their Toolkit). Locus's PC-Interface has their own 3Com driver that talks only to their application, so nothing else can use it. However, they use the drivers provided by Excelan or Micom, so it is at least possible to coexist, if you want to write different application back ends for each of those boards. And now Excelan has come out with a new revision of its socket development library which is incompatible with previous versions! I am curious what other approaches have been used or might work to have several applications share a driver, and work with most of the existing boards. The lack of standards here between board manufacturers causes application developers to support a subset, and really hurts the growth of PC networking. I always thought it was unfortunate that a particular product only supported a few boards, until I started looking into what it takes... Rich Goldschmidt rlgvax!golds@uunet.UU.NET uunet!rlgvax!golds sun!sundc!rlgvax