I'm using Linus's git tree as of commit
d85714d81cc0408daddb68c10f7fd69eafe7c213. I built that kernel under vmware
workstation 6.0.1 which emulates a pcnet32 nic. When I only turn on
CONFIG_PCNET32, my network interface doesn't seem to come up fully: my dhcp
server sees a request, offers an IP addr, but the VM running 2.6.24 doesn't
pick up the response. Manually configuring the eth0 and pinging yields
similar results: no replies come back. The same VM has lots of other
kernels on it, all of which work fine (so it's not an iptables/selinux
problem, or the like).
If, however, I turn on the EXPERIMENTAL feature CONFIG_PCNET32_NAPI, then
the driver works again. So, is this NAPI feature now a required one or did
the base driver somehow got broken? I've not investigated this further.