RFC: Evolution of the em driver

Jeremy Chadwick koitsu at FreeBSD.org
Wed Oct 31 01:17:00 PDT 2007


On Tue, Oct 30, 2007 at 09:06:39PM -0600, Scott Long wrote:
> There are too many examples to name in every OS of drivers that have
> tried in vain to support diverging hardware evolutionary paths.  if_dc
> and if_bge are great (or horrible, depending on your perspective)
> examples of this in FreeBSD.  My vote is to nip the madness in the bud
> on if_em and have two (or more drivers) that support their hardware
> families well instead of one driver that supports multiple families
> marginally.

For what it's worth, I agree with Scott.  I'd rather see a new and
separate driver (presumably igb(4)) than a "hacked up" em(4) driver
trying to handle tons of IC revisions.  A good example of the insanity
the latter causes is nve(4) vs. nfe(4).  :-)

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |



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