On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Donald Becker wrote:
> > The mdelay(300) is completely bogus.
...
> Ouch. You are absolutely right, and I take the blame for not reviewing
> more closely. That's what I get for trusting vendors too much ;-)
> [D-Link has been the one patching sundance and dl2k for a while now]
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've been meaning to go through several drivers and fix up the stupid
> assumptions they make about autonegotiation completion time.
Putting broken changes into the kernel with a plan to go back later and
clean them is a bad development methodology.
> > The driver also changes the transceiver settings to non-standard
> > values.
> Which lines of code are you referring to?
Removing "options" as a way to set the transceiver.
> This _might_ be a case where the docs are inaccurate, since the patch
> was done by D-Link with access to the chip designers.
No, it's unrelated to specific chip. It's a change that looks good when
you see only that driver, but the change makes it inconsistent will all
of the other drivers.
--
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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