Can you list what cards/systems use this driver? I at least am totally unsure. Thanks Nick On Mon, 25 Feb 2002, David S. Miller wrote: > > This is to announce the first test release of a new Broadcom Tigon3 > driver written by Jeff and myself. Get it at: > > ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/davem/TIGON3/tg3.patch.gz > > The patch is against 2.4.18 but there is no reason it should be > difficult to apply this patch to any other tree. > > It is meant to replace Broadcom's driver because frankly their driver > is junk and would never be accepted into the tree. For an example of > why their driver is junk, note that the resulting object file from our > driver is less than half the size of Broadcom's. That kind of bloat > is simply unacceptable. Next, Broadcom's driver is still way > non-portable, ioremap() pointers are still dereferenced directly among > other things. Finally, their driver is just plain buggy, they have > code which tries to use page_address() on pages which are potentially > in highmem and that is guarenteed to oops. > > There are other problems with their driver too, just ask as I'm in a > good mood to grind my axe about this stuff :-) > > We would also like to give Broadcom a big "no thanks" because > their lawyers refused to give Jeff the documentation for the Tigon3 > chipset using an NDA that would allow him to write a GPL'd driver > based upon said documentation. This means that all that we know about > the hardware has been reverse engineered from Broadcom's GPL'd driver > plus some experimenting. It is why this driver has taken so long to > finish, because it is hard to find incentive for this kind of brack > breaking work when the vendor is totally uncooperative. > > I personally think Broadcom has some hidden agenda that requires that > their driver be "the one". So instead of just complaining about such > stupid policy, we've done something about it by doing our own driver > with all the problems fixed. > > We'd really appreciate if people would test this thing out as hard > as they can. I can tell you that I've personally only been able to > test out the following scenerios so far: > > 1) Both big-endian and little-endian platforms. > 2) 64-bit on big-endian side, 32-bit on little-endian side. > 3) IOMMU based PCI dma platform on 64-bit/big-endian side, > non-IOMMU based PCI dma platform on 32-bit little-endian side. > 4) 10baseT half duplex, 100baseT full duplex > 5) Copper based connectors, as that is all that Jeff and I have. > > Gigabit and fibre are the big areas where our testing has been > lacking. We have also not done any tuning of the driver at all, > although we do consider the driver feature complete. > - > : send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ > - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
