Re: tulip driver in 2.1.11* - 2.1.21 is broken - new driver

Matti Aarnio (matti.aarnio@sonera.fi)
Mon, 14 Sep 1998 08:30:32 +0300 (EEST)

"David S. Miller" <davem@dm.cobaltmicro.com> wrote:
...
> Short summary: Some broken drivers need to be fixed, and the 2.1.120
> changes only made the bugs more visible.
>
> What I now think what was happening is that many drivers were getting
> away with murder in their transmit routines, and the 2.1.120 patches
> finally brought this to light.
>
> Some drivers seem to assume they run with interrupts totally disabled
> in their transmit routines. The only thing they were ever allowed to
> really assume was that the transmit routine was never re-entered.
> This is all we are supposed to guarentee at the generic device
> transmit level when calling these functions.
...
> A quick scan shows:

Of current kernel source tree drivers, no doubt ?
...
> 2) tulip.c appears to be ok, perhaps by luck, even though it doesn't
> disable interrupts explicitly. Although I have seen cases where
> adding interrupt disabling to the transmit routine made bugs in
> this driver go away even in 2.0.x on the Cobalt machines...

Current kernel's tulip.c is ok, but lattest one from Becker's
driver collection does blow up with 're-entering interrupt..'.
(Like the lattest 3c59x.c does too..)
...
> Looks like a few drivers need to be fixed up about this.

Indeed...

> Later,
> David S. Miller
> davem@dm.cobaltmicro.com

/Matti Aarnio <matti.aarnio@sonera.fi>

-
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/faq.html