NIC driver family trees

This may be interesting to some people -- and its recorded here for posterity. A number of NIC drivers in Solaris have been developed using "copy-paste" approaches. As a result, there are a couple of family "lines" for NIC drivers.

le (ancient 10 Mbit only) driver, is the common root for one heritage. From le was developed hme. From hme were developed qfe, eri, and gem. From these was developed ce. And ultimately, from these was developed nxge (although nxge shares little with its ancestors anymore.)

Another heritage goes back to ancient dnet (tulip) drivers on x86. dnet begat dmfe, which begat bge. There are probably other drivers that bge spawned, but its hard to know for sure how much copying may have occurred.

afe and mxfe were developed pretty much independently from the others, although afe was developed first, and begat mxfe (which is for very similar hardware -- a good counter example for a case where copying the code made sense -- of course I'm also the original author of both drivers). (They started life as pure DLPI from-scratch drivers, but migrated to GLDv2, and later to GLDv3.)

Murayama's drivers (e.g. sfe) owe some ancestry to Linux, although we're told that all the code was changed so that no derivative code from Linux remains.

I believe e1000g owes its ancestry to a combination of Linux code at Intel, and unique code written just for Solaris. (There was another driver, ipge, for the same hardware, which was part of the le/hme heritage, but it died in late toddlerhood.)

The wifi drivers owe most of their existence to the work done in FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

The other older drivers (pcelx, elxl, pcn, etc.) appear to share little if any heritage with any of the other NIC drivers.

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