Re: [PATCH 0/1] alx driver

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

On Wed, 2013-06-12 at 09:11 +0200, Johannes Stezenbach wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 11:26:48PM +0200, Johannes Berg wrote:
> > So ... I was stupid enough to not research drivers for this device
> > before buying a board that included one, I figured in 2013 it wasn't
> > really possible for such a simple gigabit ethernet device to not
> > have a driver in Linux.
> > 
> > Boy was I wrong.
> > 
> > The vendor driver was previously posted on netdev, and subsequently
> > somewhat cleaned up, but ... it still had useless hand-rolled locks
> > (with test_and_set_bit/msleep!), horrible macros, and was generally
> > quite a mess.
> 
> I had the same unpleasant experience about missing alx driver
> for my Asus P8H77-V board.  I found this:
> http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/alx
> https://github.com/qca/alx
> 
> And this mail talks about upstreaming:
> http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/unified-drivers/2013-April/000064.html

There as been lots of talk, and they even submitted a driver once, but
it was pretty crappy ... I decided that cleaning it up now, while
liberally and deliberately removing features I don't want to worry about
right now, was going to be easier than using their out of tree driver
for my system forever, because I have little hope that they'll actually
manage to put something upstreamable together.

Anyway, it's a completely spare-time effort for me, so contributions to
the driver are clearly welcome.

johannes