[tulip] Most ethernets record?

[David S. Miller]

Ben Greear writes:
 > Yes, there seems to be a major pissing contest between who can
 > be the more hard-headed about this kind of thing.  The end
 > result, unfortunately, is broken drivers that are making my
 > life, as well as many others, a complete pain in the arse
 > when it comes to doing any type of high-performance networking
 > on Linux.  We have all these great routing/firewalling technologies,
 > but try finding a NIC/driver that can hold up under the strain!!!

There is an official channel to help the maintainers work
on fixing the problems that you find, and in fact the current
2.4.x tulip maintainer is quite good a being responsive.

Talk to Jeff Garzik about 2.4.x tulip problems if you haven't
done this already.

 > I don't think the load can be completely dumped on Becker though,
 > because I have been pretty dissapointed with my own efforts to get
 > my VLAN patch added to the kernel.  The patch process can definately
 > seem like a black hole at times...

This is comparing apples to oranges.  You want to add a complete
subsystem to the kernel.  This is different than adding a driver.

When you add a subsystem to the networking, which I maintain, sure
there are a lot of hurdles.  But look at the bluetooth stuff, that
person did all the work I asked of them to make the patches acceptable
to me, and then I simply put them in.

It's a matter of taking responsibility and doing the grudge work to
get the patch in.  Sometimes like Linus I have to dump mails because I
simply get so many.  You have to retransmit and you have to do the
work to convince me to put in your changes, not the other way around.
If you don't want to put forth the effort of retransmitting,
explaining your changes clearly, and fixing up anything I request,
then you really don't care about your patch.

Maybe I won't even like how you do the VLAN stuff at all.  And if I do
hate it, you have to find a way to make it acceptable to me and deal
with the things I don't like about your changes.  It's called
filtering and it tends to keep crap from accumulating in the tree.

And don't take it personally, this is what everyone has to go through
who wants to install major changes.  It doesn't matter if you are
going through Linus, myself, or some other maintainer.

Later,
David S. Miller
davem@redhat.com