networking driver implementation question

[Till Straumann]

Hi.

I am porting Donald Beckers linux driver for the yellowfin/Symbios
53C885
to RTEMS.

When I look at the ethernet drivers in 'libchip' I can see that a common

scheme is to create driver tasks. The TX task doing something like

for (;;) {
   wait_on_event();
   IF_DEQUEUE(&ifp->if_snd, m);
   sendpacket(m);
}

Note that this loop is running in the context of the network _driver's_
task.

A close look at IF_DEQUEUE() [which normally is only used in the context

of the BSD networking task] reveals that the queue data structure is not

protected by any kind of mutex.

Can somebody explain how the queue is protected from being corrupted
(other than by good karma)??

-- Regards, Till.