2.3.51 tulip broken

Jorg B. jorg_b@cwo.com
Mon Mar 20 18:27:57 2000


It is actually bad news for the linux community that Donald Becker stopped 
working on drivers for tulip NIC's.
It takes one guy screaming who basically kills the fun for everybody else.
Now that Donald is no longer providing updates for the tulip NIC driver I'm 
sure that there will not be working support for these cards in the 2.4 
kernel series.

JB


At 12:12 PM 3/20/00 -0500, you wrote:
>On Sat, 18 Mar 2000, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>
> > I see only the end results, and especially the cathedral style of
> > development as applied to your pci-netif changes.
> >
> > Let's look at your FTP site.
> >
> > Stable tulip.c -- last updated Dec 28, 1999.
> > Stable eepro100.c -- Last updated Aug, 1999.
> > All other stable drivers are older than this.
>...
> > Test 3c59x.c -- last updated Dec 15, 1999.
> > All other 2.3 drivers last updated in Sep 1999.
>
>There is a reason for that for those dates, which you should have picked up
>on.  That was when the driver development issue last came up, and I was
>thoroughly flamed for separate driver development lists, especially by Jeff.
>I was told that my contributions were no longer needed.
>
>I decided to take a few month break from my driver update schedule, which
>was taking up most of my waking hours, to work on Scyld and the Beowulf
>software.  I provide driver updates to clients that value them and write new
>drivers, but left the kernel development merges to those that obviously
>wanted control of them.
>
>Trace back to the beginning of the current thread: this round of finger
>pointing was started because there are driver bugs that haven't been
>addressed, and 2.4 is about to come out.
>
>It must have seemed like a good idea in Autumn '99, when the kernel was
>"just about to be frozen" in preparation for late-'99 2.4 release, and money
>was pouring into anything with "Linux" in the name, to believe that my
>Ethernet driver development could be better done elsewhere.  There were many
>companies that could suddenly see that PR value in contributing to the
>kernel.  And certainly there are developers that want to see everything
>brought under the central planning of the linux-kernel list.  But replacing
>my efforts is perhaps not as easy as it first appears. Nonetheless, the
>decision was made months ago, and it would be very difficult to reverse it 
>now.
>
>Donald Becker
>Scyld Computing Corporation, becker@scyld.com
>
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