On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, Ben Greear wrote:

quoted

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 don't know the quality of the patches submitted by dlink, but I do
know that the existing driver in the 2.4.18 kernel absolutely does not
work at all.

It's a driver that _did_ work, but untested changes were made.

So, if there is a hack/patch that makes it work, I consider
that better than completely broken, even if it is ugly.

The DLink modified driver is still missing a few important changes for the
new chip version in MMIO mode.  For instance, ASICCtrl apparently must
now be read and written as a 32 bit word, while the older chip worked
with writew().

-- 
Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
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