Ethernet Packet Driver Software

What Is It?

Ethernet interfaces require some low-level software to make them work. This
software initializes the interface, sets up the interface to use the
appropriate hardware and software interrupts, manages buffers and interacts
with the operating system, and so on. Since this software "drives" the
interface, it is called interface driver or packet driver software.

Large Unix machines are usually sold with the Ethernet interface driver
software built into the operating system, and you don't have to do anything
to make the Ethernet interface work properly. The tight integration of
hardware and software makes it possible for the vendor to supply the driver
software.

Personal computers are another issue, however, since the vendors who sell
the PC have no control over what variety of operating system software you
may run on the machine.

The result is that you often need to supply your own driver software, or
the vendor of your PC operating system software needs to supply you with
interface drivers. Since there are many Ethernet interfaces that can be
installed in a PC and there is also a wide variety of PC operating systems,
things can get pretty complex.

Currently there are several "standards" for supplying packet driver
software that knows how to talk to various Ethernet interfaces (also called
"adapters") and PC operating systems and applications. One widely adopted
approach that has the advantage of being vendor-neutral is to use the
collection of packet drivers made available by Russ Nelson.

If the vendor of your operating system software makes available a set of
packet drivers you may wish to use them instead. However, you may have no
packet driver software at the moment, or you may want to use some of the
freely available packet driver-based applications, in which case you can
use the packet driver collection made available by Russ Nelson.
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