On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 08:27:42AM -0800, Jim Gifford wrote: > Jeff Garzick refuses to apply it do to spinlocks. Jeff refuses to apply the tulip phy init patch because it could hold off interrupts for up to 2.5ms. I agree this is not a good "side effect" of this patch. However, rewriting tulip initialization sequence to avoid this "side effect" is non-trivial. And in practice, the interrupts are held off only for 600us or so. > Andrew Morton is > including in his tree because it fixes issue with Parisc and with MIPS > based builds. and ia64-linux. > 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. No, with faster CPUs, tulip just didn't work on parisc-linux or ia64-linux. Exact same symptom you had on the mips platform. > 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 Oct 2002 actually. http://lists.parisc-linux.org/pipermail/parisc-linux-cvs/2002-October/031613.html That was a first mostly correct version. Here's the "final" patch (at the time): http://lists.parisc-linux.org/pipermail/parisc-linux-cvs/2002-December/032081.html > submitted it to Jeff Garzick several times with no response. That's not fair to Jeff - as much as I think he's being juvenile in this case. Jeff and I did exchange email. He's just trying "encourage" me to rewrite the driver initialization sequence. Not interested. I prefer to maintain this patch in parisc-linux source tree myself. > 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. I happened to talk to Andrew about this at OLS2004 - just before you showed up with the nice failure case on Mips: http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-net/msg11267.html And a second, similar patch that I had outstanding at the same time: http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-net/msg11268.html > Jeff sends back a one liner say doing to it's use of > spinlocks it's not accepted. I didn't need a longer explanation - I understood his concern. > That's the gory history. Sorry - it's more gory than you thought. :) cheers, grant
