From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ben Greear Subject: Re: pci-skeleton duplex check Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 15:08:26 -0800 Sender: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com Message-ID: <3DF916EA.10504@candelatech.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Jeff Garzik , Roger Luethi , netdev@oss.sgi.com, Linux Kernel Mailing List Return-path: To: Donald Becker In-Reply-To: Errors-to: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org Donald Becker wrote: > I've been actively developing Linux drivers for over a decade, and run > about two dozen mailing lists for specific drivers. I write diagnostic > routines for every released driver. I thoroughly test and frequently > update the driver set I maintain. And since about 2000, my patches were > ignored while the first notice I've have gotten to changes in my drivers > is the bug reports. And the response: "submit a patch to fix those > newly introduced bugs". I've even had patches ignore in favor of people > that wrote "I don't have the NIC, but here is a change". > > A good example is the tulip driver. You repeatedly restructured my > driver in the kernel, splitting into different files. It was still 90+% > my code, but the changes made it impossible to track the modification > history. The kernel driver was long-broken with 21143-SYM cards, but no > one took the responsibility for fixing it. For what it's worth, I have yet to find a tulip driver that works with all of my 4-port NICs. Becker's fails with the Phobos 4-port NIC, a very recent kernel driver fails to negotiate correctly (sometimes) with the DFE-570tx NIC. Both of them failed a while back when I tried to put 3 DFE-570tx's into a single machine. On average, I've had better luck with the kernel driver than with Becker's, and since it is quite a pain to compile and test it, I have been ignoring it more and more. Mr Becker: Perhaps you could rename your tulip driver becker_tulip and have it separately buildable and configurable in the kernel config options? If it was back into the kernel proper it would be much easier to experiment with. Thanks, Ben -- Ben Greear President of Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com ScryMUD: http://scry.wanfear.com http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear