Alan Cox wrote:
>
>
> I tried Donald's 0.91 drivers (about f or g or so) a while back with 2.2.12pre
> and they broke a pile of older cards. For 2.2.14 I'll try something newer
> and see what happens.
>
> The 2.3.x ones were a total disaster but I don't think of that as unexpected
> given the scale of changes. Im sure they'll fix up fine.
>
...
>
> People saw hangs with the older cards. In the last case Donald also acknowledged
> it. The tulip stuff with the 0.91 thing and weird bugs is a real pain, not
> just to me for merging stuff. Im sure it drives Donald up the wall
>
...
>
> That works for 2.3.x but not for 2.2. 2.2 has to be stable. That stability
> has to include not breaking for existing setups.
>
One of features of tulip is how many different variants of the tulip
chip is handles. But it isn't just the different pci-ethernet
variants (eg 21140,21143, pnic, etc...), but also the physical
interfaces: mii, sym, serial, etc.... Then throw in EEPROM formats,
different assignments of hardware control bits, etc...
That's a big space to cover in one driver. All of this makes tulip
relatively large and complex as drivers go. IIRC, the source is
100k+. And it has *worked* for me quite well. However I'm on the more
modern hardware that gets the most attention. Testing for side effects
against older hardware under these circumstances is at once tedious
and difficult.
-Richard
--
Richard Dynes
rdynes@varcom.com
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