Question regarding skb forwarding

Hi all,

I’ve been trying to create a bridge like driver for a while. The
project is running into a wall due to the inability of seeing either
netdevice_ops structure or hard_start_xmit function from my device
driver in both Intel ixgbe and e1000e drivers.

Basically, I have a structure preserving all struct net_device
pointers running on system. I intend to send a skb via calling either
dev->netdev_ops->ndo_start_xmit() or dev->hard_start_xmit(). Long
story short, netdev_ops is a NULL pointer in my build for both ixgbe
and e1000e and hard_start_xmit() is not a member function of struct
net_device in 3.13.0 kernel.

I borrowed the idea of calling dev_queue_xmit(skb) instead from kernel
bridge driver but this is also plagued by the fact that netdev_ops
does not exist, as dev_queue_xmit will subsequently use netdev_ops
without guard.

Are my approaches off? What did I do wrong? Does anyone have any idea
as why my ixgbe and e1000e driver builds do not have netdev_ops
exposed in struct net_device pointer for the hardware ports?

Environment:
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with kernel version 3.13.0-66-generic
Gcc 4.8
Ixgbe source version 4.0.3
e1000e source version 3.1.0.2

Thanks ahead to everyone.

Regards,
Andy