PCMCIA Token Ring and kernels 1.3.78 onward

Christopher A. Smith (casmith@clark.net)
Thu, 4 Apr 1996 10:10:59 -0500 (EST)


Upon hearing that pcmcia-cs-2.8.9 supported PCMCIA Token Ring cards, a
co-worker asked me to help him upgrade his IBM Thinkpad to a more recent
version of Linux (something beyond 1.2.13) so that he could plug it in to
our Token Ring network at work.

After installing the preliminary stuff -- new gcc, C libraries, etc. --
and FINALLY getting the right version of the modules stuff -- I won major
idiot points for that blunder -- I tried installing the latest version of
the PCMCIA stuff, 2.8.10, and a recent version of the kernel, 1.3.79.
Everything compiled fine, and everything loaded properly except for the
PCMCIA token ring stuff, which failed because trdev_init() was undefined.
After looking through the PCMCIA source and the kernel source, I found
that trdev_init(), in drivers/net/ibmtr.c, is mentioned in comments and as
a prototype, but never defined anywhere in the kernel source. I backed up
to kernel 1.3.72, found trdev_init() defined there, and then moved forward
in the revision history, from 1.3.72 to 1.3.83, and found that trdev_init()
disappeared in 1.3.78.

Was this intentional -- ie. some sort of in-progress code reworking -- or
was it purely inadvertent?

--------------------------------------
Christopher A. Smith
Arlington VA * casmith@clark.net