2.3.51 tulip broken

[Donald Becker]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2000, Homer Wilson Smith wrote:

>     I just want to say how much we appreciate the work you are doing on
> these drivers.  We use Kingston cards across the boards on all our
> production machines with 2.0.x kernels.  It is very important to us to
> have uniform ether support across all machines in our ISP. For example
> when Kingston moved to the 21143 chip this caused problems with FD and we
> had to scramble to get things working again.

I'm in the increasingly untenable position of being expected to maintain
drivers for the current and older kernels, but not having any influence over
the new development exactly because of that backwards compatibility.
It's no fun being responsible for just the old versions, especially after I
did years of unpaid development work.

There were many interface changes added incrementally in the 2.3 kernels.
Some with added without consideration of, or even in opposition to,
cross-version compatibility.  And few of those interface changes were
designed, as opposed to just hacked in.  When I proposed an new PCI
detection interface I wrote a skeleton driver, converted several of my
drivers, demonstrated that it worked with several hardware classes and wrote
a usage guide.  But the few day hack was added because the patches were
incremental (even if misdesigned and broken).


Donald Becker
Scyld Computing Corporation, becker@scyld.com

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