Subject: Network drivers with direct io memory accesses

From: Greg KH <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 May 2008 17:10:44 -0700

Hi all,

I'm currently sitting on two network drivers:
 Alacritech gigabit driver that supports 3 different classes of cards:
  http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/gregkh/gregkh-2.6/patches/ldp/net-add-alacritech-slicoss-driver.patch

 ET1310 network driver
  http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/gregkh/gregkh-2.6/patches/ldp/net-add-et131x-driver.patch

Both of these drivers are accessing memory on the devices directly,
without using the proper kernel abstractions for it, making them usable
only on x86-based boxes probably.

My question is, does this have to be fixed in order to get them
accepted into the tree?  It's going to be a very big effort to fix them
up from what I can tell.  I don't mind, it's just going to take a while,
and I'm wondering if people want to use these drivers sooner than the
month or so it's going to take me (at the least.)

Yes, I know the Alacritech driver still has the firmware in the patch
itself, that will be moved out, I know, and there are probably other
minor issues left to clean up in each of these drivers, that's not the
point here...

Any thoughts?

thanks,

greg k-h