Atmel MACB Ethernet Driver

The MACB ethernet controller on AT32AP7000 is supported out of the box by the Linux kernel version 2.6.20 and later. For older kernels, please see the LinuxPatches page for a patch against a specific version of the kernel.

There's already a driver for the Atmel EMAC ethernet interface (at91_ether), which is similar to the MACB interface but not completely the same. Most importantly, there are some changes in the DMA engine which may be difficult to handle with a single driver.

The EMAC interface is present on AT91RM9200 devices, while the MACB is present on AT32AP7000 and AT91SAM926x devices.

In the future, it may be beneficial to reduce code duplication by splitting the drivers in three: A common part (atmel_eth), an EMAC part (atmel_emac) and a MACB part (atmel_macb.) This will take a lot of work and will probably cause quite a lot of discussion on lkml and other mailing lists.