Garrett D'Amore wrote: > 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.
elx != elxl. The former is pretty dead, and was blown to bits by the GLDv0 removal [PSARC 2003/728] and its own EOF [PSARC 2003/701], but elxl is still somewhat common. It's a 3c905, if I recall correctly. > 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? Dunno. Besides students and other folks hanging onto ancient gear, the two big places where I've seen these really old drivers in use is on virtualization platforms and integrated chipsets. It looks like VMWare emulates e1000g, so maybe that one's not a serious problem, but I *know* we've blown some modern platforms out of the water because we EOF'd old drivers. If nothing else, terminating elxl will cause lots of machines still in Sun labs around the world to go dead, including machines that are used for automated testing of IPMP. I no longer have access, but search for GLDv0. There was at least one motherboard that was bricked by that removal, because it had a chipset that emulated old elx (not elxl) hardware. >> 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. ;-) Heh. I used to collect serial cards. ;-} -- James Carlson 42.703N 71.076W <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list [email protected]
