netdev - Re: How come realtek drivers are combined

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Message-ID: <20080627191835.GA5064@electric-eye.fr.zoreil.com>
Date:	Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:18:35 +0200
From:	Francois Romieu <romieu@...zoreil.com>
To:	Mario Limonciello <mario_limonciello@...l.com>
Cc:	netdev@...r.kernel.org, edward_hsu@...ltek.com.tw
Subject: Re: How come realtek drivers are combined

Mario Limonciello <mario_limonciello@...l.com> :
[...]
> Realtek provides several (separated) drivers for their different
> chipsets, r8169, r8168, r8101, etc. I see that they are regularly all
> merged into the r8169 driver in the kernel. How come it works this
> way ?

I made it this way.

> Is it just because no one ever bothered to do it differently ? 

It was suggested before but it was not strongly argumented and I have
a strong bias against it as long as it is not clearly needed.

> Obviously, they all share a very similar code base so its somewhat
> sensible to try to produce a single driver. 

It was.

I'll probably end splitting things between the old pci-only 8169 and
the newest pci-e though.

> I would think it would work a lot better for everyone if Realtek and
> the kernel maintainers that work on the Realtek driver were directly
> in sync rather than having to play tag pulling patches from each other's
> drivers.

Given that the choice of operating systems for laptops on Dell's online
shop does not include my favorite OS, "everyone" seems a bit of an
overstatement to me (sorry, could not resist :o) ).

Compare two versions of the same driver from Realtek and you should
realize that you are addressing a false problem.

-- 
Ueimor
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