On Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:48:52 -0800 (PST)
David Miller [off-list ref] wrote:

From: Henk Stegeman <redacted>
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 11:41:14 +0100

Please CC: netdev, now added, on all networking reports and patches.

Thank you.

quoted

I discovered the hard way that because linux bridging uses
net_device_ops, bridging only works with network drivers that publish
their device operations trough net_device_ops.

In my case running:

brctl addif br0 eth0 (where eth0 fec_mpc52xx.c did not yet support
net_device_ops) gave me a:

Unable to handle kernel paging request...

After changing fec_mpc52xx.c to support net_device_ops the problem was fixed.

If possible some kind of detection in the bridging software is i think
mostly appreciated for early detection of this problem, as it is
pretty hard to relate the error message to a not updated driver.

cheers,

Henk

The normal register_netdevice stuff take care of setting up net_device_ops
for old style drivers. Was there something different about how this
device was being setup?