On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, Ben Greear wrote:
> > Very, very few vendor patchs are worth applying. They sometimes know of
> > otherwise undocumented chip bugs, but a lot of the actual code is bad.
> >
> > It's not "maintaining" a driver when you just take a vendor modification
> > of a driver and assume it's OK. You have to understand the changes and
> > evaluate if they make sense.
>
> I don't know the quality of the patches submitted by dlink, but I do
> know that the existing driver in the 2.4.18 kernel absolutely does not
> work at all.
It's a driver that _did_ work, but untested changes were made.
> So, if there is a hack/patch that makes it work, I consider
> that better than completely broken, even if it is ugly.
The DLink modified driver is still missing a few important changes for the
new chip version in MMIO mode. For instance, ASICCtrl apparently must
now be read and written as a 32 bit word, while the older chip worked
with writew().
--
Donald Becker becker@xxxxxxxxx
Scyld Computing Corporation http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210 Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403 410-990-9993
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