James Chapman wrote:
Kok, Auke wrote:
Jeff Garzik wrote:
Can knowledgeable people characterize the PCIe adapters somehow? Is
that "ICH8-era and later", or does it go back further than that?
ich8 and 9 are consistent with 82571/2/3 - on-board nic's based on the
82571 design with different PHY's, and added features for the newer
demands. A driver split here would be possible but not justified IMHO.
> if you want a quick view of features by chipset type, open the patch
> and search forward to /e1000_setup_flags/.
I briefly looked over your new driver. I think it might benefit by
moving common parts into one or more libraries (or modules) and have
separate chip-specific drivers for 82540, 82541, 82542, 82543, 82571
etc. Put all the chip-specific bits in a chip-specific driver and have
each driver call into the common (shared) code. The device
probe/init/remove would be done by the chip-specific code, not the
common code like it is now. When built as a module, the chip-specific
parts and the common parts could be built as separate modules; modprobe
would load the common parts automatically. Most of the code would be in
the common part since these chips are very similar.
splitting beyond the obvious does not make any sense and will just add
confusion. I'm not against a pcie/pre-pcie split or even going a step further
and looking into using PHYlib as you suggest below, but we should really avoid
trying to create an unmaintainable mess where we have to patch 7 drivers for
each generic issue we find.
Doing the above would lead naturally to a series of patches which will
make it easier to review. When Intel release a new device variant in the
future, it might be supported by a new, small driver rather than needing
modifications to one big monolith. Also, the kernel would be loaded with
only the code it needed to support the specific device(s) present.
BTW, since you're doing a major update, would it be a good time to
switch to phylib to manage your PHYs?
well, PHYlib might help, so I'm not negative against doing that right now. It
will be quite some work.
Auke
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