RE: bonding with 3c59x driver

Well I am still curious why the 3c59x driver has such slow 
polling when 
other drivers I have been testing are able to report almost instantly 
when I remove a network cable. Could it be that other network chips 
generate an interrupt on cable removal and the 3com chips do not?

Not sure about those specific cards, but detecting the
link state might require software bit-banging of an MII
(or similar) interface.

Since this needs delays between all the edges it can
end up spinning the cpu for a noticable time, especially
if the resolution (and minimim delay) of the delay()
function used is significantly longer than the delays
actually required - which might only be a few 100ns.

Using a cpu spin for the delays is also slightly
problematical because the writes might get 'posted'
and delayed further - so the writes have to be forced
out to the device itself (eg by a readback) prior to
the delay() being requested.

If the driver is polling the link status it might
be valid to do one bit-bang transition on each timer
interrupt. This would separate the edges without
spinning the cpu - provided there is a fast method
for being called on every timer tick.

Another scheme I have used is to write each value
to the bit-bang register multiple times - using
the maximum speed of the IO writes to generate the
required delays.

	David