Re: Fix for Donald Becker's DP83815 network driver (v1.07)

[Roberto Nibali <ratz@tac.ch>]

Hi Ion,

> I think the UP-APIC support was added primarily to support the NMI oopser
> on UP systems. I might be wrong, though.

You're right, at least from the perspective of this patch:
http://www.csd.uu.se/~mikpe/linux/upapic/upapic-2.4.1
 
> You can safely disregard the "early initialization deferred" messages.
> They are essentially harmless.

Thanks for the info. I can sleep now :)
 
> As for the 16 eth ports limit, if you want to increase it, simply edit
> drivers/net/net_init.c and change the value of MAX_ETH_CARDS. This limit
> appears to also affect modules, so my earlier suggestion of using modules
> wouldn't have helped.

Thanks a lot. And sorry I don't know the kernel sources and documentations
good enough yet.
 
> If the only thing you need from your boxes is networking-related, than
> it's probably ok. Otherwise I'd wait a bit longer before putting 2.4 on
> production servers...

It is only network related (packetfiltering and load balancing with QoS) 
and I like the improved mm. I've been testing 2.4 since its early days
and f.e. on the Intel L440GX+ boards it runs like hell, also with SMP.
Only the CPU numbering is incorrect if the kernel is SMP and you only
put in one processor. But I read somewhere that also this feature is 
normal since it seems to be impossible to give the CPUs the correct
numbers because there is no defined order of initialization.
 
> Yeah, I guess I'll submit a patch to remove the experimental bit, after
> the current code changes are accepted..

Good. Yes, I saw the patches. I might try it out back here with a 2.4.x
kernel and 4 quadboards.
 
> You shouldn't need to do that, it's just wasted memory. The ethX_dev was
> used mostly to avoid probing for ISA cards, which is completely irrelevant
> when using PCI cards. As for the 4 quadboards limit, see above -- all you
> need to change is MAX_ETH_CARDS.

Will certainly do that. And thank you again for this information.
 
Best regards,
Roberto Nibali, ratz

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