On Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:13:48 -0400
Jeff Garzik [off-list ref] wrote:

Andrew Morton wrote:

quoted

On Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:04:06 -0400
Jeff Garzik [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Dave Jones wrote:

quoted

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 03:37:41PM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
 > Dave Jones wrote:
 > > I've just been playing with a model 2 OQO, which has an RTL8139.
 > > It gets detected just fine, though it doesn't actually work..
 > > 
 > > eth0: RealTek RTL8139 at 0xf8830000, 00:00:00:00:00:00, IRQ 18
 > > eth0:  Identified 8139 chip type 'RTL-8139'
 > > 
 > > The null MAC address being one clue.  Another oddity is that
 > > ethtool reports that there's no link detected, even though there is.
 > > (Enough for it to PXE boot a kernel from at least :)
 > > 
 > > Futzing with the debug= modparam didn't yield anything extra at all.
 > > 
 > > Any clues?
 > 
 > Sounds like a broken EEPROM.  Does supplying a MAC via ifconfig prior to 
 > 'ifconfig ... up' help?

Ah. This sounds enlightening: http://www.oqotalk.com/index.php/topic,1511.0.html
Seems a shame to have to choose PIO vs MMIO for a distro kernel though.
Would there be any objection to turning that into a modparam ?
(If we wanted to get really fancy, we could even quirk around it automatically
 when we detect broken hardware).

Something like this?  :)

http://www.linux.sgi.com/archives/netdev/2004-11/msg00226.html

It did not go upstream but it needed some init-time bug fixing, IIRC. 
Maybe akpm remembers more why my patch sucked... :)

Apart from its From: address you mean? ;)

I can find no record, sorry.

Yeah, it was in -mm for a while (via netdev-2.6.git#ALL most likely), 
and a -mm tester reported that it consistently oops for him, or 
something along those lines.

You continually (and rightly!) pestered me about it, and I withdrew the 
patch from -mm since I didn't have time to futz with it.

Is there any possibility for the driver to discover broken MMIO at runtime?
Could it look for some portion like mac address or HW_REVID being all zeros or all ones?