Re: PATCH dm9ks interrupt handling

Michael Gao wrote:
> 5 second timer seems crazy to me too. However if we remove it
> completely, this may bring us a situation where the interrupt is held
> too long?

I checked the original davicom driver
(http://www.davicom.com.tw/eng/download/Driver/driver_9000a.htm) it also
has this disable interrupts after X consecutive rx packets without tx
thing.

It smells quite a bit like a workaround for some hardware bug to me. But
it could be something different it tries to solve; or just a clueless
engineer implementing the driver :)

I'd really like to know why that code is there, and what purpose it has.

(as a side note the changes from the original davicom driver "06/17/2006
    Butchered for NTR3 OSD" are quite big and messy)

Are there documentation for this NIC available btw?

>> I have removed this mechanism and also removed the bogus ioctl handler
>> that just returned success to all calls, which makes things like the
>> mii interface look like they work, but always return junk!
>>
> MG: Not sure about this, do we need this stub for driver compatibility
> purpose? thus not getting NULL pointer if somewhere upper layer will
> ever call the ioctl?

It is not needed, upper layer takes care of that
(http://lxr.linux.no/source/net/core/dev.c#L2612)

 anders