Andrew Morton wrote:
Martin Michlmayr <tbm@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
* 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?
This has been hanging around for too long. We need to get it over the hump.
Jeff, can you please suggest how this patch should be altered to make it
acceptable?
Answer hasn't changed since this was last discussed: sleep, rather than
delay for an extra-long time. That's the only hurdle for the tulip
patches you keep resending.
Francois Romieu even had an untested patch that attempted this, somewhere.
Jeff
