Re: Tulip RaQ2 64 Bit Fix

[Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com>]

* Jim Gifford <maillist@jg555.com> [2006-01-16 08:27]:
> >>>The attached patch allows the tulip driver to work with the RaQ2's
> >>>network adapter. Without the patch under a 64 bit build, it will
> >>>never negotiate and will drop packets. This driver is part of
> >>>Linux Parisc, by Grant Grundler. It's currently in -mm, but Jeff
> >>>Garzick will not apply it to the main tree.
> >>>      
> >>Why?
> Jeff Garzick refuses to apply it do to spinlocks. Andrew Morton is
> including in his tree because it fixes issue with Parisc and with
> MIPS based builds. So it's kinda of what is the right thing to do. I
> also use this driver on my x86 builds, and it actually performs
> better. Here is a little history of how Grant made the driver.
> 
> Grant Grundler is the network maintainer for Parisc Linux.  He
> discovered that the tulip driver didn't perform that well. He
> researched the manufactures documentation and found out how to fix
> the driver to work to its optimum performance. He did this back in
> 2003, has submitted it to Jeff Garzick several times with no
> response. Around late 2004, I started to do test builds on 64 bit on
> my RaQ2 and discovered that the driver would not auto-negotiate
> transfer speeds. Talked to numerous people, then someone put me in
> touch with Grant. I tested the driver for about 2 weeks, ask Grant
> why it wasn't sent upstream, he told me about the spinlock issue. I
> then contacted Andrew Morton, explained everything as I am here, and
> he agreed it was needed and tried to get Jeff to add it. Jeff sends
> back a one liner say doing to it's use of spinlocks it's not
> accepted.

Andrew, do you think that issue will be resolved in some way at some
point?

-- 
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/