Re: Broken ethernet on SolidRun cubox-i

[Michael Walle <michael@walle.cc>]

Am 2021-01-08 13:37, schrieb Russell King - ARM Linux admin:
> On Fri, Jan 08, 2021 at 01:14:19PM +0100, Michael Walle wrote:
>> Am 2021-01-08 13:01, schrieb Russell King - ARM Linux admin:
>> > This sounds like a mess of indirection. What is "Christophs dtb"?
>> > Why are there different dtbs out there for the same platform? If
>> > there's changes necessary, why aren't they being submitted to the
>> > mainline kernel?
>> >
>> > In fact, why aren't users reporting these problems to mainline kernel
>> > developers? Why do we have to have this tortuous bug reporting route
>> > which makes testing fixes difficult?
>> >
>> > This rather makes me not want to care about this.
>> 
>> Well first it was a suspected issue with 'my' change in the Atheros
>> PHY driver, which turned out to be not the case. I _voluntarily_
>> tried to debug the issue with a user (Christoph) just to find out
>> that it is likely caused by the commit mentioned above. So for
>> startes, why would I care? I just wanted to be kind and provide
>> some help. If anything, this shows me, I should rather stick to
>> my own problems.
>> 
>> So please advise Christoph, where he should report this bug.
> 
> There is, unfortunately, a long history where the appropriate kernel
> developers have had no knowledge of bugs that have been introduced
> by changes that have been made, simply because users report them on
> things like web forums or other mailing lists.
> 
> In the normal process of things, the bugs have only found out about
> years later, maybe when someone finally contacts the appropriate
> kernel developers pointing out the problem.
> 
> A case in point was the removal of bogomips from /proc/cpuinfo, which
> resulted in kernel developers being roasted by Linus when it was
> pointed out that users had been reporting the problem on forums for
> over a year. Apparently, it was _our_ fault for not knowing about
> them.
> 
> Similar seems to be happening with my SFP work - it seems people would
> much rather report problems on random forums around the Internet rather
> than send an email to anyone who can fix the problem in mainline
> kernels.

Maybe they don't know better..

Christoph approached me privately (through Matus, because he was in
the PHY driver header, I guess). I tried to collect as much
information as possible and then posted it to the LKML. I don't
see anything wrong here.

I already mentioned I don't have any hardware to test. So all I
tried to do was to help Christoph get a device tree blob to easily
test on its hardware.

-michael

> Kernel development is fundamentally a difficult, frustrating and
> depressing activity.

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