James Carlson wrote:
Garrett D'Amore wrote:
Some hardware simply *can't* easily do this. Some drivers are really
stale and haven't been updated:
* dnet only does link state reporting on certain cards (this with MII
transceivers)
* pcelx and elx don't do this at all
Thanks; I forgot about the elx problem.
I'd love to just EOF elxl. While it was famous at one point for being
one of the few cards that would reliably work with Solaris on x86
hardware, the hardware itself is really crufty and suffers from some
really aggravating limitations. (The biggest of which is a limitation
on MTUs which prevents it from supporting VLANs fully.) pcelx falls in
the same category, basically.
I suspect some people out there still depend on ancient elx hardware.
Still, I wonder if now with our vastly improved set of NIC choices, if
we can't now simply EOF it. Suitable replacements are *easy* to find
now -- $10 will get you a Linksys LNE100TX, and $5 will get you a
suitable rtls8139.
elx is closed source anyway, and getting sufficient "variety" of devices
to properly test all the variations might prove to be "non-trivial".
Thoughts? Who would complain if elxl or pcelx were scheduled for EOF?
So, there are exceptions. But *most* drivers in ON (and certainly
anything for hardware you bought in the past year or three) will work.
It'll probably be a bit hard to find hardware that runs into those
exceptions ... and also hard to find hardware to test any fixes to those
drivers.
Yeah. Although I have some. :-p But then I have a drawer full of older
PCI NICs that I keep around just for this kind of testing. (And now I'm
starting to get a drawer full of older audio boards as well. ;-)
- Garrett
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