Re: aic79xx trouble

Justin T. Gibbs
2004-05-20T20:49:34Z

> On Sun, May 16, 2004 at 12:10:12PM -0600, Justin T. Gibbs wrote:
>> > The Adaptec Ultra320 cards (aic79xx) do not work reliably on Tyan Thunder
>> > motherboards.
>>
>> The U320 chips likely work a lot better now if you use driver version 2.0.12.
>> The AMD chipsets seem to screw up split completions, and this version of
>> the driver avoids the issue for the most common case of triggering the
>> bug (transaction completion DMAs) by never crossing an ADB boundary with
>> a single DMA.
>
> Justin,
>
> Just out of curiosity, would you care to submit small fixes in separate
> patches instead of a huge patch over a full -pre series
> (2.4.28-pre for example) ?

If you look at the bksend output from my site, it is broken up into
lots of smaller changes. These changes are not tied to a particular
2.4.X revision - they were made and released in response to driver
bug reports and coded so the driver will operate in just about any
2.4.X kernel - customers can't wait for the next kernel to be
released or the community to enter a "pre" phase of development.

As for submitting "small fixes in separate patches", the fixes are
whatever size they come out to be after they are implemented. I
always choose the fix based on correctness and maintainability, not
on whether or not I can break it up into small patches for submission.
In other-words, the size of the changes have nothing to do with their
merit.

What it seems you are asking for is more frequent submissions.
While that is possible, I don't know that it is in the best interest
of the community. I submit a new update to kernel.org after changes
have had a time to settle and have been validated by Adaptec and
several of its customers. Unless the failure is going to be seen
in wide-spread use and the fix is so obvious that it does not need
rigorous validation, I prefer to wait and submit a known quantity.
The latest drivers on my website have had a sufficient level of
testing for me to now feel comfortable with pushing the changes to
kernel.org.

> Are distros using your updates ?

I believe that SuSE is merging these drivers into their next 2.6.X
based release.

--
Justin