[3528] in Release_7.7_team
Our Ethernet driver struggle resolves sooner than expected.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Wed Sep 25 13:01:31 2002
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 13:02:41 -0400
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Cc: release-team@mit.edu, owls@mit.edu
To: andrew boardman <amb@mit.edu>
From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
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Yesterday marked the milestone of saying, "Yes a Laptop is
athena-supported."
Today marks a milestone of a different sort, a problem I thought was
gonna engage me and my team went PFFFT behind my back. If this were the
game of adventure, I'd be seeing a message, "Your workload feels
lighter."
The official word from Andrew Morton, the offical custodian of Ethernet
drivers at Red Hat is:
> The eepro100 driver is basically abandoned. Intel's e100 driver
> is fully merged and supported in 2. and 2.4-current.
>
> I'd suggest that you stick with e100 - it appears to be the future....
On further inquiry, I learned that the e100 source is fully merged into
the official Linux source trees so this is not a matter of Red Hat
selling out to a proprietary driver, but instead a source inclusion of
the driver that's judged best overall.
What this means to us is:
We can expect a clean shift to the Ethernet driver that works as the
default over the longer term.
We need not trouble ourselves with pushing anyone to change the
situation.
We might want to make a few changes in the near term to make sure the
Athena system uses the e100 driver in a clean and forward-thinking way.
I'm happy, hope you're happy too.
-wdc
