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

[<ke...@us...>]

>>> 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.

My feeling is make it a helper function until it's judged worthwhile to
be something done for every PCI NIC. It won't make any difference to the
size since a boot image typically contains only one copy of the function
as it will contain only one driver.