Donald, is there a clean way to patch your tulip driver into the kernel (2.3.52
and up) now that there are numerous files involved?
The tulip driver in the kernel has several issues (different machines):
- locks up requiring link state down/up
- has a one shot link state up, requires module to be removed/re-inserted or
rebooted to cycle the link state
- randomly kills the machine dead without any OOPS for debug
I'm leaving PCMCIA issues out of this for the moment. Can we get a tarball
release of your tulip driver now or if you give me guidance, I'll write up an
html page with the necessary instructions for swapping back and forth?
-d
p.s. yes, Donald -does- actively work on drivers, anyone who pays attention knows
this.
Donald Becker wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Mar 2000, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>
> > No one expects anything from you and has not for a long time. If you
> > wanted to actually WORK on the drivers, rather than just complain,
> > then I'm sure many people including myself would find that work
> > very valuable.
>
> That's complete BS, as you more than anyone knows. I'll recap recent history:
>
> Just few months ago I finished the design on a new probe routine that
> Made it easy to maintain driver that would work on kernels back to 1.3.*.
> Made it possible for a single driver to work with PCI, CardBus, and
> hot-swap PCI.
> Handled power control and Wake-On-*.
>
> That work took several months to complete, during which time incremental
> versons of many driver were readily available using the frequently-changing
> interface.
>
> Just as I finished that work, YOU proposed a "much simpler" PCI scan
> routine, calling mine too complex. Based on the much smaller patch, that
> version went into the kernel... discarding months of my work and testing.
>
> Since then your PCI scan interface has changed many times, to the point that
> it's more complex than mine. It had to, because the issues were the same.
> My years of experience writing CardBus-compatible drivers meant that I knew
> the issues up-front. AFAIK, you hadn't written a single CardBus or
> hot-swap-PCI driver when you proposed your scan routine.
>
> But this letter isn't about this detailed, narrow issue. It is instead
> about the attitude that such interface changes are readily, and only lightly
> considered. Each one of those minor interface change impacted multiple
> drivers. Many of those drivers were being actively worked on, perhaps based
> on a stable 2.2 kernel.
>
> To you such an interface change is a minor tweak that can be with an
> automated search-and-hack. What takes you only a minute per file to change
> might take the developer hours over the next few months to deal with to
> integrate with testing. This is especially true when Linus insists that all
> traces of 2.2 support be expunged in the 2.3 drivers.
>
> > I never claimed to be perfect but at least I am trying to fix some
> > of the the bit-rotten, UNMAINTAINED net driver code currently in
> > the kernel.
> ...
> > Finally, only the Tulip and RTL-8139 drivers are maintained by me.
>
> You made operational and interface changes to *far* more than two drivers.
> Those were drivers with active card-specific mailing lists and development.
> Your attitude while making these changes was "Here are changes I made to an
> old driver version. Test them for me and tell me if they work. If they
> don't work, tell me what I did wrong."
>
> Donald Becker
> Scyld Computing Corporation, becker@scyld.com
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe send a message body containing "unsubscribe"
> to linux-tulip-request@beowulf.org
--
\\\\\|||||| &%&%&%& 99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
@|~|' |o> @|& fix one bug, compile it again...
| \\__/ | /, |& 101 little bugs in the code....
\ / -' ,
E-- |--HUGS---
-
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