Re: [Devil-Linux-discuss] Backport of skge driver for Marvell NICs

[willy t. <w...@1w...>]

Peter Daum <gator_ml <at> yahoo.de> writes:

(...)
>
http://linux.1wt.eu/kernel/patches-2.4.33-wt3/pool/2.4.33-skge-1.6-1-glue.diff
>
http://linux.1wt.eu/kernel/patches-2.4.33-wt3/pool/2.4.33-skge-1.6-2-files.diff
>
http://linux.1wt.eu/kernel/patches-2.4.33-wt3/pool/2.4.33-skge-1.6-3-build.diff
>
http://linux.1wt.eu/kernel/patches-2.4.33-wt3/pool/2.4.33-skge-1.6-4-build.diff
> (I couldn't even figure out who is the author/maintainer of these kernel
> patches)
> 
> It would be nice to have this driver included in Devil Linux. Maybe someone
> knows a more "official" source for this backport?

The original backport is from the skge driver's author, Stephen Hemminger. The
out of tree driver is located here :

   http://developer.osdl.org/~shemminger/releases/

I just repackaged his code to make an "in-tree" patch. I will normally merge
this code into 2.4.35, and Stephen offered to update the code then to match
2.6.

> I personally tried these patches with
> the current 1.2 Devil from CVS - I didn't test it very thoroughly yet, but it
> also seems to work with much better performance in the 2.4.33 kernel.

I have performed benchmarks, and the driver is still slightly slower than
sk98lin, and consumes a little bit more CPU. However, it fixes a few problems
with the sk98lin, the most annoying one being the NIC becoming silent after
sending a few thousands UDP packets, then requiring that you send at least
one TCP packet to start sending UDP again. Imagine that on an NFS server !

Regards,
Willy