Intel ethernet adapter + driver issues - e1000

[Donald Becker]

On Fri, 23 Aug 2002, Mark Hahn wrote:

> Subject: Re: Intel ethernet adapter + driver issues - e1000
> 
> > i did download the e1000 driver from intel
> > and it does recognize my pwla8390MT pro1000 card
> > but it doesnt ping the outside ip#... ( *pout* ) ...

Note: this the new "1010" board which which seems to have started
shipping a month or so ago.  The Intel drivers from May or earlier don't
recognize this board.  (You would think that Intel would have early
access to their own hardware...)

> so just install 2.4.20-pre* already!

That's not a stable kernel.  It's much better to update a single driver,
with a bounded impact, than to play kernel-de-jour.

> it's a sign of lingering pernicious windows-ism 
> if you prefer a vendor driver over a maintained driver in the kernel ;)

I agree, but the people controlling what gets into the kernel apparently
prefer vendor releases.  They would rather put in vendor modifications
to my drivers than my original version.  Thus the kernel occasionally
adds such cruft as a driver that disables interrupts and directly
programs the PC timer chip to do a three second delay.  That wasn't in
my original version, but the "vendor enhanced" version took code from
their Windows driver...

-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993