Bug 6940
| Summary: | Outdated tulip driver | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | [Retired] Red Hat Linux | Reporter: | Chris Ricker <chris.ricker> |
| Component: | kernel | Assignee: | Cristian Gafton <gafton> |
| Status: | CLOSED DEFERRED | QA Contact: | |
| Severity: | high | Docs Contact: | |
| Priority: | medium | ||
| Version: | 6.1 | ||
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Target Release: | --- | ||
| Hardware: | i386 | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Whiteboard: | |||
| Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | Bug Fix | |
| Doc Text: | Story Points: | --- | |
| Clone Of: | Environment: | ||
| Last Closed: | 1999-11-15 16:28:40 UTC | Type: | --- |
| Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
| Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |
| Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |
| oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
| Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
| Embargoed: | |||
|
Description
Chris Ricker
1999-11-12 06:10:16 UTC
Unfortunately, the newer driver breaks some of the older cards. We're looking into ways to solve this. Yeah, I know. So far the best idea I've had is to install both drivers. Call one tulip.o, and the other tulip-0.91.o, or whatever. Go ahead and alias the tulip.o by default, but have the other one there and alternatively insmod'able (during install, if you're doing the install via net) / alias'able (after the system is up and running). The main problem is that, without the new driver installed, people are in the Catch-22 of needing the new driver so they can get the new driver (or vice-versa for old real Tulips if you default to the new tulip driver). If one's not going to work for everything, that's fine as long as you document it, but have the other one around *somewhere* so that people who are going to need it can have it. Alternately, you could do a couple of *really* ugly things, like ask the person which tulip driver to use during the install, or else leave tulip-0.89 in as the tulip driver, and hack the tulip-0.91 in as pnic.o, and make tulip.o only recognize older cards and pnic.o recognize all the newer almost-but-not-quite tulip clones. Actually, there's a tulip driver disk available at people.redhat.com/notting/tulip You can boot the installer with 'linux dd' and it will use this driver instead. Unfortunately, I've yet to hear any confirmation that the driver disk works, so I can't release it more generally yet.... Stupid me--I forgot RH had the supplemental driver disk option (certainly a lot more elegant than what Debian's talked about doing for that card, which is an entire separate package a la pcmcia-cs drivers ;-). At any rate, I've tried the supplemental driver disk on three machines, and it worked on all of them. One suggestion: "rename" it. In the modinfo file right now, you've got DEC 21040, most 21*40 Ethernet which is the same name as the other driver. That means both show up on the list, and people have to guess by order which one is which.... Other than that, it seemed good to go. I'd like to add something to the discussion too. We have some tulip clones here, and the old 0.89H breaks their speed/duplexity if you don't use autonegotiation. It's impossible to get 100/ Full-Duplex without modifying the driver and recompiling it. Passing relevant options (options=5 full_duplex=1) when loading the module don't work. This is only caused by some tulip chips, it seems. All these problems were fixed when we moved to 0.91. I really hope that version would come in the distribution in at least _some_ form. Has Donald Becker / tulip-devel mailing list been notified about the driver problems (concerning older tulip cards) ? |