Re: status of via velocity in 2.6.9

[Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

On Maw, 2004-12-07 at 00:07, Johan wrote:
> How 'working' are the via velocity drivers in 2.6.9?

They should be pretty solid. The original VIA code worked pretty well,
the kernel merge had a few glitches but in 2.6.9* it seems rock solid
with the bits Francois applied.

> Unfortunately, while they (the driver and card, that is) seem at first 
> to work fine, auto negotiating a gigabit connection with my hub, the 
> network stops working after 5 ish minutes (could be function of bytes 
> tx'ed as well, I guess). restarting the network (appart from a kernel 
> upgrade, the box is redhat fc2) fixes the problem... for another 5 minutes.
> 
> Is this known behavior?

I've seen this with an Edimax el cheapo gigabit switch, but it was also
doing it with some other cards so I assumed it was random cheap junk.
Since I swapped that for a slightly better one it's behaved reliably.

> (*) The card's box advertizes linux compatibility with RH 7.3 (2.4.18-3 
> or later), which makes me wonder whether another driver may work better. 
>   2.4.18-3 would seem to predate the via-velocity driver.

There is a vendor provided driver for older systems (and in fact VIA
networking wrote and contributed the code that was cleaned up to go into
the kernel too)

Alan