Re: [PATCH 2.4] forcedeth

From: Jeff Garzik
Date: Sat Nov 08 2003 - 12:40:28 EST


Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
Attached is forcedeth: A new driver for the ethernet interface of the
NVIDIA nForce chipset, licensed under GPL.

The driver was written without support from NVIDIA, it's the result of
a cleanroom development:
Carl-Daniel and Andrew reverse engineered the nvnet driver and wrote a
specification, Manfred wrote the driver based on the spec. Since the
driver has been available and working for a while now, Carl-Daniel
fitted some compat glue to make it compile under 2.4.

This release it intended for developers, it's alpha quality: normal
network traffic could work, although slow due to incomplete interrupt
handling. It does work on two nForce 2 systems, nForce and nForce 3
are untested.


Neat! I saw Manfred posted this driver for 2.6.x, as well. I'm glad soembody FINALLY got around to supporting this chipset under Linux.

Anyway, even with an alpha-quality driver, it's a driver that works where otherwise the kernel doesn't. So, after I review the driver, I would prefer to merge it soon rather than later. It gets users going, after all.

Has nVidia yelled yet? Since it's cleanroom, according to you, I don't see any problems at all...

Jeff



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