Status of arm/ixp4xx networking and 2.6.24
Hi All
The arm/ixp4xx port of the 2.6.24 kernel is in a state of flux. Until
now, Martin Michlmayr and I have been maintaining Christian
Hohnstadt's ixp4xx network drivers [1] in Debian's repository. While
this driver works very well, it has been rejected upstream, and
although Christian has very kindly agreed to provide support to us, he
has stopped actively making changes to the driver to support newer
kernels. Currently, his driver does not compile with 2.6.24 because of
the napi changes introduced in 2.6.24.
Krzysztof Hasala has also developed a drivers to support networking on
the ixp4xx processor [2]. This driver is being pushed upstream, and
the arm specific parts have already been accepted by Russell King and
are expected to be merged upstream with the 2.6.25 merge window.
However, Krzysztof still needs to submit the Ethernet and High Speed
Serial (HSS) drivers to netdev for review. Currently, Krzysztof's
Ethernet and HSS drivers compile and work with 2.6.23, but as I
mentioned above, 2.6.24 introduced changes to the napi interface and
Krzysztof has not yet updated his driver to support this new
interface. Therefore, the latest version of his driver does not build
with 2.6.24 (like Christian's driver). This weekend, I updated
Krzysztof's driver for the napi changes and Rod Whitby and I tested my
changes on the Linksys NSLU2. I have sent Krzysztof the patch in the
hope that it will allow him submit the his Ethernet and HSS drivers to
netdev for review soon. However, until he reviews my patch and updates
his drivers, I am hesitant to use to his driver in the Debian kernel
2.6.24 kernel. Therefore, arm/ixp4xx currently does not have a
working/supported network driver.
I will try to update Christian's driver to conform with the napi
changes in 2.6.24 and ask Christian to review them to make sure that I
haven't made any mistakes. However, until I complete this task, the
arm/ixp4xx kernel in trunk will FTBFS with the patches currently in
the Debian repository.
Gordon
[1] http://www.hohnstaedt.de/ixp_npe/
[2] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/chris/linux-2.6.git;a=summary
--
Gordon Farquharson
GnuPG Key ID: 32D6D676
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