Hi. I have been using the SMC9000 NIC driver (smc9194.c) and
recently tried kernel 2.4.0-test1-ac19. Appearantly in the 2.3.45
patch the driver was marked 'obsolete' in drivers/net/Config.in:
if [ "$CONFIG_OBSOLETE" = "y" ]; then
tristate ' SMC 9194 support' CONFIG_SMC9194
fi
meaning that it no longer appears in 'menuconfig'. Even when I
put CONFIG_SMC9194=y in by hand, the driver itself compiled but
was not linked ... putting CONFIG_OBSOLETE=y into .config did
get it linked, and now it works fine. But 'make menuconfig'
wipes out CONFIG_OBSOLETE every time its run as it doesn't have
any kind of option for obsolescence (should it be covered by the
"prompt for experimental/incomplete drivers" question? The "help"
for the option says:
This option will also make obsoleted drivers available. These are
drivers that have been replaced by something else, and/or are
scheduled to be removed in a future kernel release.
). That option does not enable them, though.
This problem also affects a few other drivers marked as "obsolete."
Anyway, putting both "CONFIG_OBSOLETE=y" and "CONFIG_SMC9194=y" into
.config works around that for now, and then driver works fine then.
But the next question is, what is the status on the smc9000 driver?
Is it really obsolete? That would mean that the driver functionality
has been replaced by something better somewhere else (I hope) ... but
where? I was not able to find another NIC driver that had support for the
card. (I am not using a Dell laptop, my smc9000 card is a PC104 card)
If the driver will be removed in a future kernel, what should we
use for this card?
Please cc: me in replies as I am not subscribed to the list.
Thanks for your help.
Matt Toups
toups@axonn.com
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jun 23 2000 - 21:00:22 EST