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January 04, 2005
Happy Meal Ethernet
Over at Read My Lips, Tig wants to know:
Here's a question for which no amount of Google searchin' could disclose an answer: Can a McDonald's "Happy Meal" really make ya happy?
Short answer - No. Although I note that someone suggested that it works if you are between 3 and 6 years old :-)
In the process it made me remember the infamous story about the Sun hme interface. I'll try and avoid too much technical detail while still getting the story right. In a Unix system (like Sun's Solaris boxes), all the physical devices have short names in the kernel and the device tree. The oldest Sun ethernet interface that I can remember is the Lance Ethernet (short name: "le"). This was later replaced pretty much everywhere with the "hme" interface which was rumoured to be 'Happy Meal Ethernet'. One theory is that this stemmed from the dual scsi/ethernet controllers (i.e. you get 'free' ethernet with your scsi or vice versa) but I seem to remember it appearing as an onboard interface before it was on expansion cards. According to a series of posts (to identify weird kernel code) over at the joke is also extended to the relevant kernel code:
How about drivers/net/sunhme.c ?
It's not scary, but it is absolutely hilarious, even to people who don't even know C.
static void happy_meal_tcvr_write(struct happy_meal *hp, unsigned long ...)
{
int tries = TCVR_WRITE_TRIES;
ASD(("happy_meal_tcvr_write: reg=0x%02x value=%04xn", reg, value));
/* Welcome to Sun Microsystems, can I take your order please? */
if (!hp->happy_flags & HFLAG_FENABLE)
return happy_meal_bb_write(hp, tregs, reg, value);
/* Would you like fries with that? */
hme_write32(hp, tregs + TCVR_FRAME, (FRAME_WRITE | (hp->paddr ...
It is possible that the code came after the funny name - you never know with code...
Posted by Ozguru at January 4, 2005 06:00 AM
