April 2012
Intermediate to advanced
352 pages
8h
English
Content preview from FreeBSD Device Drivers
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Chapter 16. Network Drivers, Part 1: Data Structures
Network devices, or interfaces, transmit and receive data packets that are driven by the network subsystem (Corbet et al., 2005). In this chapter, we’ll examine the data structures used to manage these devices: ifnet, ifmedia, and mbuf. You’ll then learn about Message Signaled Interrupts, which are an alternative to traditional interrupts and are commonly used by network devices.
Note
To keep things simple, we’ll examine only Ethernet drivers. Also, I won’t provide a discussion on general networking concepts.
Network Interface Structures
An ifnet structure is the kernel’s representation of an individual ...