[tulip] Re: [PATCH] making old Conexant driver work

[Pavel Roskin]

Hi, Donald!

I'm impressed how fast you managed to reply me :-)

> > Search on the web shows that the support for Conexant existed in the Tulip
> > driver in the past, but was removed later.
> 
> Conexant support exists in my driver, but not the driver branch
> distributed with the kernel.

I'm sorry, but I probably cannot find the driver you mean.  This is what I 
have looked so far.

1) The drivers at http://www.scyld.com/network/tulip-devel.html
Both the "standard release" and the "test version" have internal version 
0.93.  Both support Conexant LANfinity.  Both are using the custom PCI 
support instead of the kernel PCI API.  It appears that both drivers are 
from the same "old generation".  They also (wrongly IMHO) use 
requiest_region even if USE_IO_OPS is undefined.

2) The driver from the source RPM on
http://www.scyld.com/network/updates.html
This is even older - it's v0.92x.  The same comments apply.

3) Drivers from http://sourceforge.net/projects/tulip/
Neither the stable nor the development versions include support for
Conexant LANfinity except in the diagnostics utility.

I'm sorry, but this reminds a madhouse.  I admit that I don't have the
full picture, I don't know if you can update those pages, I don't know
whether Conexant threatens you.  But I believe that nobody can prevent you
from adding a notice to the driver included into the kernel that it has
been deliberately crippled as a result of something beyond your control.
Even if you don't control any of the sites I mentioned above, I'm sure
that Linus and Alan will gladly apply a patch with such notice to the 
kernel.

I don't think that anybody can force you and Jeff Garzik to say that
Conexant LANfinity is not supported because of insufficient documentation
(see http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=150363&forum_id=3720)

Something must be very wrong here :-(

-- 
Best regards,
Pavel Roskin