Re: [Etherboot-developers] rtl8139 TX timeout solved (for me)

[Marty C. <md...@th...>]

On 9/5/2001 2:30 PM Eric W. Biederman ebi...@ln... wrote:
>> My gut reaction is not to make this common, and just to insert helper
>> functions calls.  The reason is that pci devices while they tend to
>> be fairly standard, they are not always so.  Leaving this logic to the 
>> device driver sounds a little more reasonable to me.  I don't
>> think etherboot supports any unreasonable hardware at the moment.
>And I forgot to say.  If you code it I really don't care how it is dealt
>with, unless I'm the project maintainer.  If I code it I'll write it my 
>way :)

I am of two minds on this.  One one hand, since PCI bus initialization is 
generally done outside the drivers anyway, I suspect his won't make much 
difference, since most of the code I've looked at seems to be doing the 
same thing for all the cards that need it.

The sticky part is that we're trying to deal with (possibly) buggy 
drivers that have failed to properly locate and initialize a card.  Since 
this seems like a BIOS interface issue and not a driver issue, I'd prefer 
that the etherboot core deal with it, and let the driver deal with making 
the card ready to send and receive packets.

I'll be interested in hearing what Ken's take on this is when he gets 
back.  The other way to look at it is that if we put the logic in the 
Etherboot core, it might break more things, rather than just the drivers 
we add the code to.  I don't think this is the case though, since, 
basically, it's code very similar to what the etherboot core does (or 
should do) now.

Anyway, interesting to think about.

Marty

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   Name: Marty Connor
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