On Monday 25 February 2008 08:28:14 Jeff Garzik wrote:

Grant Grundler wrote:

quoted

ISTR there was a time when tulip would compete with de4x5 for devices.
tulip is the preferred driver. That's clearly no longer the case
and perhaps both distro's need to revisit this.

The only reason why de4x5 still exists is that the /tulip/ driver fails
to work on a few chips like the 21142 (43?) shipped in various alpha boxen.

de4x5 needs to go away, it's been unmaintained for ages, doesn't support
any of the new hotplug APIs.

But has extensive port auto-detection which seems to work great (at least on 
my card). I don't feel like porting that code to de2104x - the code looks 
complex.

quoted

de2104x is a "work in progress".
That's why it's marked "EXPERIMENTAL" in the Kconfig file.

It's not a work in progress, it works just fine for most people (the few
that are left).

Last I heard, there was a problem with non-twisted-pair stuff, but
that's about it.

'experimental' is generally a poorly maintained marker.

So we have two unmaintained drivers - one that works fine (and is production 
quality - or at least seems to be) but does not support hotplug APIs and one 
that was never finished (the TP-unplug problem is present at least since 
2003).
Perhaps de4x5 could be ported to new API(s)? I think that it's much easier 
than fixing obscure hardware-related problems like cable auto-detection.

-- 
Ondrej Zary