* Jim Gifford <maillist@xxxxxxxxx> [2006-01-16 08:27]: > >>>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? > 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. Andrew, do you think that issue will be resolved in some way at some point? -- Martin Michlmayr http://www.cyrius.com/
