[2639] in linux-net channel archive
Re: As 2.0 looms
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Philip Blundell)
Wed Apr 24 23:03:37 1996
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 1996 13:14:20 +0100 (BST)
From: Philip Blundell <pjb27@cam.ac.uk>
To: Paul Gortmaker <gpg109@rsphy6.anu.edu.au>
cc: linux-net@vger.rutgers.edu
In-Reply-To: <9604240319.AA23260@rsphy6.anu.edu.au>
On Wed, 24 Apr 1996, Paul Gortmaker wrote:
> Also the 'EtherExpress support' should read 'EtherExpress-16 support'
> as lots of people seem to get confused on this one. Speaking of which,
> I did some short tests on a couple of ee-16 cards at 1.3.90, involving
> simultaneous Rx and Tx ftp of a 4MB file (kernel source) cached in RAM,
> and nothing broke. So this might be one candidate to "de-alpha" if
> others using them continuously have also not encountered problems.
The EtherExpress driver has a rather nasty bug which locks the card up
about one time in ten when it's initialised. Other than that, I think
it's now pretty stable. I'm not sure if that's sufficient cause to make
it non-alpha.
> The 3c507 was pretty much useless the last time I tried it, and I don't
> think it has changed at all (not counting generic changes like the
> multicast handling, etc.) in 1.3.x, so it should remain alpha. Not
> surprising, as it is another dain-bramaged i82586 card.
Yes. The 3c507 was developed alongside the old EtherExpress driver, and
so is still broken in the same way. If somebody was to lend me a card, I
daresay it would only take a fairly short time to rework the new and
improved EtherExpress code to drive the 3c507 as well. But they don't
seem to be all that common.
> A lot of the other cards listed as "alpha" are there simply due to
> the fact that they are relatively uncommon, and thus feedback is low
> to nonexistent. Not sure what you want to do about those...
Yes. The 3c505 is one such. Again, I think the driver for that is now
fairly good (though nowhere near perfect) -- it probably deserves to be
made non-alpha.
> And many need to be tagged with KERN_DEBUG or at least KERN_INFO.
Phil
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