On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, Jeff Garzik wrote:

Donald Becker wrote:

quoted

The mdelay(300) is completely bogus.

...

Ouch.  You are absolutely right, and I take the blame for not reviewing 
more closely.  That's what I get for trusting vendors too much ;-)
[D-Link has been the one patching sundance and dl2k for a while now]

Very, very few vendor patchs are worth applying.  They sometimes know of
otherwise undocumented chip bugs, but a lot of the actual code is bad.

It's not "maintaining" a driver when you just take a vendor modification
of a driver and assume it's OK.  You have to understand the changes and
evaluate if they make sense.

I've been meaning to go through several drivers and fix up the stupid 
assumptions they make about autonegotiation completion time.

Putting broken changes into the kernel with a plan to go back later and
clean them is a bad development methodology.

quoted

The driver also changes the transceiver settings to non-standard
values.

Which lines of code are you referring to?

Removing "options" as a way to set the transceiver.

This _might_ be a case where the docs are inaccurate, since the patch 
was done by D-Link with access to the chip designers.

No, it's unrelated to specific chip.  It's a change that looks good when
you see only that driver, but the change makes it inconsistent will all
of the other drivers.  

-- 
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