Re: Realtek 8139 problem on 486.

[Heiner Kallweit <hkallweit1@gmail.com>]

On 01.06.2021 18:09, Nikolai Zhubr wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> 01.06.2021 14:42, Heiner Kallweit:
> [...]
>> Great, so you have a solution for your problem, as i would expect that this
>> setting also makes 8139too in newer kernels usable for you.
> 
> Well, not exactly, although I'm definitely getting close to some sort of satisfactory solution, and I appreciate all the helpfull replies.
> 
> Relying on this BIOS setting is still not good, because yet another motherboard I've just tested today does not have it (or at least in no evident form anyway).
> 
>> This hardware is so old that it's not very likely someone spends effort on this.
> 
> Now I'd like to ask, is quality reliable fix still wanted in mainline or rather not? Because I'll personally do my best to create/find a good fix anyway, but if it is of zero interest for mainline, I'll probably not invest much time into communicating it. My understanding was that default rule is "if broken go fix it" but due to the age of both code and hardware, maybe it is considered frozen or some such (I'm just not aware really).
> 
Driver 8139too has no maintainer. And you refer to "mainline" like to a number of developers
who are paid by somebody to maintain all drivers in the kernel. That's not the case in general.
You provided valuable input, and if you'd contribute to improving 8139too and submit patches for
fixing the issue you're facing, this would be much appreciated.
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Regards,
> Nikolai

Heiner