On Thu, 25 Jul 2002, Lists (lst) wrote:
> > > Why the net drivers from the 2.4.18 are so old? Why are not updated from
> > > the scyld.com (made by Donald Becker)?
> > Lots of history involved in answering that question :)
> > Basically, Linus's and Becker's development styles are different.
For those that don't know the history, I have been a major contributer
to the Linux kernel since the early days. I designed the interfaces,
wrote, tested and maintained essentially every Linux network driver from
the early days of Linux networking through 1999. At that point there
was an explosion of people that wanted to be Linux developers, and Linus
started accepting unvetted patches from people that didn't test beyond
"it works for me".
Nominally the "development differences" was based on my driver mailing
lists, which were run indendently of the kernel mailing list.
However those drivers-specific mailing lists had been active since 1995.
> With the Donald's driver after 2 days of usage I receive this:
>
> > Jul 24 08:29:01 lapd eth3: IRQ 5 is physically blocked! Failing back to low-rate polling.
This means either that
the APIC has lost track of the IRQ steering
(a common bug in 2.2 SMP, but believed fixed in 2.4)
the chip has disappeared from PCI space
(a new bug which may have appeared in 2.4.17 or 2.4.18, or is
perhaps related to overheating or undervoltage)
You can check for the latter problem with 'lspci'. The NIC chip will
show up as something other than a "Ethernet Controller".
--
Donald Becker becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210 Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403 410-990-9993
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