[vortex] Linux kernel driver vs. others

[Donald Becker]

On Mon, 24 Jun 2002, Bogdan Costescu wrote:

> On Sun, 23 Jun 2002, Jeff Tucker wrote:
>
> > This might be obvious to others but it is not to me. It appears that there
> > are at least two versions (possibly three) of the driver known as 3c59x.c.
> > - Donald Becker's
>
> Yes, but this driver needs some support functions found in pci-scan.[ch]
> also found on the Scyld site. It should also work with older kernel
> versions.

Perhaps a better way of putting this is
  The drivers from the Scyld site use pci-scan.c.  The pci-scan support
  allows the drivers to be backwards compatible to 2.0 and 2.2 kernels.
  The pci-scan support provides advanced features such as PCI power
  management and hot swap (including CardBus) support.

> > - The driver included in Linux 2.4.18, which obviously was split from the
> > above driver at some time in the past
>
> Yes, but over time some features from Donald's driver were ported to this
> one.

Bogdan and Andrew do an excellent job with moving support and features
to the latest kernel driver, and they are pleasure to work with.

The reason for multiple versions (for this driver I don't call it a
"split") is that I feel it's important to have kernel version
cross-compatibility.  Many other kernel developers feel it's important
to deliberately change interfaces to make compatibility impossible.

Putting out a cross-compatibe driver set
    allows testing with known-stable system
    provides driver fixes for kernels in common use
    provides new device support for installed systems

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