Martin Michlmayr wrote:
* Ralf Baechle <ralf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2005-12-05 11:44]:
The attached patch allows the tulip driver to work with the RaQ2's
network adapter. Without the patch under a 64 bit build, it will
never negotiate and will drop packets. This driver is part of
Linux Parisc, by Grant Grundler. It's currently in -mm, but Jeff
Garzick will not apply it to the main tree.
Why?
Jim, I don't think you ever responded to this.
Do you know the status of this patch?
Jeff Garzick refuses to apply it do to spinlocks. Andrew Morton is
including in his tree because it fixes issue with Parisc and with MIPS
based builds. So it's kinda of what is the right thing to do. I also use
this driver on my x86 builds, and it actually performs better. Here is a
little history of how Grant made the driver.
Grant Grundler is the network maintainer for Parisc Linux.
He discovered that the tulip driver didn't perform that well. He
researched the manufactures documentation and found out how to fix the
driver to work to its optimum performance. He did this back in 2003, has
submitted it to Jeff Garzick several times with no response. Around late
2004, I started to do test builds on 64 bit on my RaQ2 and discovered
that the driver would not auto-negotiate transfer speeds. Talked to
numerous people, then someone put me in touch with Grant. I tested the
driver for about 2 weeks, ask Grant why it wasn't sent upstream, he told
me about the spinlock issue. I then contacted Andrew Morton, explained
everything as I am here, and he agreed it was needed and tried to get
Jeff to add it. Jeff sends back a one liner say doing to it's use of
spinlocks it's not accepted.
That's the gory history.
--
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Jim Gifford
maillist@xxxxxxxxx
