topic Re: Difference between the iether and the igelan drivers in Operating System - HP-UX

Difference between the iether and the igelan drivers

Robert_Jewell — Thu, 13 May 2010 14:45:03 GMT

Can anyone explain what the difference is between the iether Gigabit Ethernet driver and the igelan Gigabit Ethernet driver?

All I can seem to see is that interface cards will support one or the other (though that is something I cannot say definitively). Release notes for each of the two don't seem to help much:

http://docs.hp.com/en/12450/GigEther-01ReleaseNoteDec2007.pdf

http://docs.hp.com/en/12606/Iether-00ReleaseNoteDec2007.pdf

I have also encountered the Ethernet Support Guide, which is a great document, but doesn't really tell me what the difference is between them (and why we need two of them is this world).

http://docs.hp.com/en/5969-7066/5969-7066.pdf

Thanks in advance.

-Bob

Re: Difference between the iether and the igelan drivers

Bill Hassell — Thu, 13 May 2010 15:47:47 GMT

> All I can seem to see is that interface cards will support one or the other

Different hardware on the boards. At the LAN connector they support Gbit connections but internally, the firmware and card designs are very different. The driver will lock onto the correct card(s) when ioscan sees the new hardware. If the driver is not installed, then the card will not be claimed.

Re: Difference between the iether and the igelan drivers

Robert_Jewell — Thu, 13 May 2010 17:09:13 GMT

Thanks Bill. So basically, some interface cards will use one driver vs the other based upon their components and how they were made.

HP has these two Gigabit Ethernet drivers to handle the variations between OEM's, firmware, etc.

-Bob

Re: Difference between the iether and the igelan drivers

Kapil Jha — Fri, 14 May 2010 00:11:35 GMT

Drivers are hardware dependent and they are different for different hardware they make hardware work on the board,
OS comes very late.

Drivers are installed to initialize the hardware.

BR,
Kapil+

Re: Difference between the iether and the igelan drivers

vemana — Mon, 17 May 2010 05:39:58 GMT

Here is the simple difference that i had in my mind.

iether is the HP-UX driver for Intel 8254X family GigE controllers.

igelan is the HP-UX driver for Broadcom 570X family GigE controllers.