Hello!
> for seven years. In the past seven months significant, poorly considered
> changes were made to the driver interface. For most of those changes I
> wasn't consulted, or even given warning about them.
Donald, I apologize, but I daresay you seems to have short memory.
The changes in interface driver <-> linux/net were proposed by you
on September 20 1998. If you forgot this I can bounce your draft
back to you.
It is worth to note that massive changes in the names
of routines (sort of hard_start_xmit() -> queue_tx()) proposed
by you are not made. tbusy is renamed not to tx_full, but encapsulated
to macros instead. But if I rememeber correctly, even name
netif_wake_queue() was invented by you.
> Some of the interface changes were obviously first passes, and had never
> really been tested. They were quickly fixed,
? They are finished on September 1999 and no bits were changed since that
time.
> Yes, there are races in some drivers. But I don't believe there are any
> here.
>
> The driver interface should be designed so that locking is unnecessary in
> most common cases.
Top level provides proper serialization to allow unload/load
modules any moment. Actually, MOD_* reference count is not a true reference
count (it is broken in this sense, by the way), but rather plain hint
for automatic module unloader.
> You should be able to ignore the timeout. The semantics of watchdog
> timeouts are that they are never called during a transmit attempt.
Right.
> Hmmm, actually, that *should* be reviewed. I can't find anyplace that the
> new semantics in pre-2.4 have been defined, so there may well be a new race
> condition here.
I said you several times that no semantic changes to the interface
driver<->core may be made without your advice. It is your right
not to believe to this warranty, certainly.
tx_timeout routine was invented by you and does the thing, which
you expected, if I understood your proposal correctly.
Actually, it would be not so bad, if _you_ prepared this patch,
then you would not have such terrible suspections, I think.
I am sorry, I honestly waited for it for year and we had no more
time to wait.
Alexey
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