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Starting a USB-to-USB Ethernet networking driver


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Been looking closely at getting a 10GbE device, but then saw an announcement from Intel that Mac and Windows Thunderbolt ethernet is coming.  The cost is pretty prohibitive for 10GbE adapters for most folks and at the end of the day we'd have to write a driver for a lower end 10GbE card.  So it got me thinking: why not implement a USB-to-USB ethernet bridge (you can get a 6' cable for < 3 USD)?

 

Has anyone seen if anyone has started a similar project before?  It would be nice to start with an existing code base if its been done, otherwise I'll start digging into how to implement it from scratch.

 

I figure that the Hackintosh community would perhaps benefit most from this since everyone has USB( and especially 3) ports anymore and so it would be a big benefit to have a 5Gb starting point; far faster than a GbE, while not as fast as a 10GbE adapter... But with USB3.1, we'd be up around Thunderbolt speeds for those configs when they start to really proliferate.

 

Seems like a winning opportunity.

 

Any suggestions as I start to explore this?

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  • 1 month later...

Myricom and Solarflare have affordable cards, I saw a 10ge unmanaged switch by netgear for $850. I use 10ge at home. But still I use 12G sas direct attached for the video work I do. And the osx myri 10ge driver will only get you around 400MB/s on a single port card.

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