Slicoss fixes and improvements

[Lino Sanfilippo]

Hi,

this patch series tries to get the slicoss driver code closer to a state in
which it is ready to be moved out of staging.

Patch 1 is a resend of patch I sent a week ago and handles an allocation
failure in slic_init_adapter().

Patch 2 fixes link state notification.

Patch 3 turns the mapping for the io area from cached to uncached.

Patch 4 remove the delay of tx queue start until a link is detected.

Patch 5 introduces register accessor functions that use register offsets.
This is in preparation to replace the register addressing by means of the
slic_regs struct with an addressing by means of offsets. This is one of the
tasks listed in the TODO file.

Patch 6 introduces a slic_flush_write() function and handles issues that
could result form pci write posting.

Patch 7 completes the task started with patch 5

Patch 8 improves the implementation around the shared memory chunk used for
isr, status and link. It removes the volatile specifier from the slic_shmem
structure which is also listed in the TODO file.

Patch 9 also addresses a TODO by merging the structures for statistics and 
thereby removing some unions.

The patches have been tested with an Alacritech SEN2104ET PCI-E (4 Port)
adapter.

Regards,
Lino


[PATCH 1/9] staging: slicoss: handle allocation failure in
[PATCH 2/9] staging: slicoss: notifiy network stack about change in
[PATCH 3/9] staging: slicoss: ensure mapping of io-memory is uncached
[PATCH 4/9] staging: slicoss: start tx queue when interface is
[PATCH 5/9] staging: slicoss: introduce register accessors that use
[PATCH 6/9] staging: slicoss: avoid PCI write posting
[PATCH 7/9] staging: slicoss: dont use a structure but offsets for
[PATCH 8/9] staging: slicoss: improve implementation concerning the
[PATCH 9/9] staging: slicoss: simplify struct for statistics