Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] r8169: Rx FIFO overflow fixes.

From: Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Feb 2012 20:37:40 -0600

Hi François, Gerd, et al,

Francois Romieu wrote:

> Realtek has specified that the post 8168c gigabit chips and the post
> 8105e fast ethernet chips recover automatically from a Rx FIFO overflow.
> The driver does not need to clear the RxFIFOOver bit of IntrStatus and
> it should rather avoid messing it.
>
> The implementation deserves some explanation:

I would be interested in some subset of these fixes for 3.0.y and
2.6.32.y.  In particular:

> 1. events outside of the intr_event bit mask are now ignored.
>    a no-processing policy for the events that either should not be there
>    or should be ignored.

This seems like a valuable and unrisky change.

> 2. RxFIFOOver was already ignored in rtl_cfg_infos[RTL_CFG_1] for the
>    whole 8168 line of chips with two exceptions:
>    - RTL_GIGA_MAC_VER_22 since b5ba6d12bdac21bc0620a5089e0f24e362645efd
>      ("use RxFIFO overflow workaround for 8168c chipset.").
>      This one should now be correctly handled.

This seems useful if we can test it.

[...]
> 3. RxFIFOOver is masked for post 8105e 810x chips, namely the sole 8105e
>    (RTL_GIGA_MAC_VER_30) itself.

This also seems useful if we can test it.

What do you think?  Is there any way I can help?  (E.g., given rough
guidelines about what approach is acceptable I'd be happy to work with
Gerd to produce a tested patch that does (1) and (2) but not (3) for
3.0.y.)

Thanks for your hard work,
Jonathan