From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Johannes Berg Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/1] alx driver Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 20:00:35 +0200 Message-ID: <1371060035.8601.30.camel@jlt4.sipsolutions.net> References: <1370899609-13954-1-git-send-email-johannes@sipsolutions.net> <20130612071107.GA7765@sig21.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: netdev@vger.kernel.org, mcgrof@do-not-panic.com, kvalo@adurom.com, adrian.chadd@gmail.com To: Johannes Stezenbach Return-path: Received: from s3.sipsolutions.net ([144.76.43.152]:42789 "EHLO sipsolutions.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1757697Ab3FLSAq (ORCPT ); Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:00:46 -0400 In-Reply-To: <20130612071107.GA7765@sig21.net> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: 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