Re: Tulip RaQ2 64 Bit Fix

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>]

Andrew Morton wrote:
> Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com> wrote:
> 
>>* 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?
>>
> 
> 
> This has been hanging around for too long.  We need to get it over the hump.
> 
> Jeff, can you please suggest how this patch should be altered to make it
> acceptable?

Answer hasn't changed since this was last discussed:  sleep, rather than 
delay for an extra-long time.  That's the only hurdle for the tulip 
patches you keep resending.

Francois Romieu even had an untested patch that attempted this, somewhere.

	Jeff