From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Donald Becker Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] NAPI patches for 2.4.19-rc1 Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 14:53:55 -0400 (EDT) Sender: owner-netdev@oss.sgi.com Message-ID: References: <3D2DBDA4.4090009@candelatech.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Cc: Jeff Garzik , jamal , Return-path: To: Ben Greear In-Reply-To: <3D2DBDA4.4090009@candelatech.com> List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, Ben Greear wrote: > > Very, very few vendor patchs are worth applying. They sometimes know of > > otherwise undocumented chip bugs, but a lot of the actual code is bad. > > > > It's not "maintaining" a driver when you just take a vendor modification > > of a driver and assume it's OK. You have to understand the changes and > > evaluate if they make sense. > > I don't know the quality of the patches submitted by dlink, but I do > know that the existing driver in the 2.4.18 kernel absolutely does not > work at all. It's a driver that _did_ work, but untested changes were made. > So, if there is a hack/patch that makes it work, I consider > that better than completely broken, even if it is ugly. The DLink modified driver is still missing a few important changes for the new chip version in MMIO mode. For instance, ASICCtrl apparently must now be read and written as a 32 bit word, while the older chip worked with writew(). -- Donald Becker becker@scyld.com Scyld Computing Corporation http://www.scyld.com 410 Severn Ave. Suite 210 Second Generation Beowulf Clusters Annapolis MD 21403 410-990-9993