Re: [announce] [patch] limiting IRQ load, irq-rewrite-2.4.11-B5

[Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>]

jamal wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Ben Greear wrote:
> 
> > The tulip driver only started working for my DLINK 4-port NIC after
> > about 2.4.8, and last I checked the ZYNX 4-port still refuses to work,
> > so I wouldn't consider it a paradigm of stability and grace quite yet.
> 
> The tests in www.cyberus.ca/~hadi/247-res/ were done with 4-port znyx
> cards using 2.4.7.
> What kind of problems are you having? Maybe i can help.

Mostly problems with auto-negotiation it seems.  Earlier 2.4 kernels
just would never go 100bt/FD.  Later (broken) versions would claim to
be 100bt/FD, but they still showed lots of collisions and frame errors.

I'll try the ZYNX on the latest kernel in the next few days and let you
know what I find...

> My point is that the API exists. Driver owners could use it; this
> discussion seems to have at least helped to point in the existence of the
> API. Alexey had the hardware flow control in there since 2.1.x .., us
> that at least. In my opinion, Ingos patch is radical enough to be allowed
> in when we are approaching stability. And it is a lazy way of solving the
> problem

The API has been there since 2.1.x, and yet few drivers support it?  I
can see why Ingo decided to fix the problem generically.  I think it would
be great if his code printed a log message upon trigger that basically said:
"You should get yourself a NAPI enabled driver that does flow-control if
possible."  That may give the appropriate visibility to the issue and let
the driver writers improve their drivers accordingly...

Ben

> 
> cheers,
> jamal
> 
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-- 
Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>       <Ben_Greear AT excite.com>
President of Candela Technologies Inc      http://www.candelatech.com
ScryMUD:  http://scry.wanfear.com     http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear