On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 11:05:43AM +0100, Thomas Koeller wrote: > since I noticed that you are working on the titan_ge driver, > I think it is time to let you know that I am currently > reworking that driver in the context of a new platform port. > The primary goal is to cleanly separate the titan_ge driver > from the yosemite platform and to make it usable with other > RM9000-based platforms as well. > > The work is rather advanced, I did implement all the necessary > changes and am now debugging through the thing to make it > work. During the process I found quite a number of issues with > the old driver that I fixed along the way. > > The main points addressed by my work are these: > > - Do no longer monopolize the message interrupt, so the titan_ge > can coexist with other drivers for OCDs. > > - Do not refuse to initialize if the link is down. This > would prevent a statically linked kernel from booting if > no network cord was attached :-( Indeed, these messages were looking suspicious and I also meant to eventually look into them also ... > - Properly allocate and deallocate any resources used. > > - Introduce a mapping layer, so that the driver can be told to > use any ethernet slice for any port number, and even leave > alone slices so they can be used for different purposes (GPI). Networking gives you zero guarantee for an association of the port numbers (as in ethX) and a particular slice. Consider the case where a board is using a PCI network controller and the Titan module is loaded later - eth0 is already gone. > - Introduce a general OCD access framework that is designed to be > useful for new platform ports. > > I will submit my work work for review once it is completed (since > I am working on it full time, that should not take too long). Until > then, I'd like to avoid unnecessary duplication of work, so I am > announcing this. Other thing to fix is the driver itself playing with the CIC directly. Good to know but collisions are likely very limited because the Titan GE work I did was only small bug fixes. The one thing which I'm chasing now is that a recent update from kernel.org import is causing a NFS hang when booting from NFS. Interestingly the system will continue after a few seconds and never hang again. May be driver related or not. Ralf
