Subject: Re: [PATCH] ixgbe: Introduce new 10GbE driver for Intel 82598 based PCI Express adapters...

From: "Kok, Auke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2007 15:02:57 -0700

Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 02, 2007 at 02:09:58PM -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
>> The patch is close to ready for 2.6.24 when this driver will need to show up.
> 
> If intel manages to fix up the reamining issues I'd rather see it appear
> in 2.6.23..
> 
>> Since I know Intel will be forced to backport this to older distro's. You
>> would be best to have a single receive queue version when you have to make
>> it work on the older code.
> 
> But that'll require the single receiver queue version I guess.  The
> netdevice abuse is the only really major issue I see, although I'd of
> course really like to see the driver getting rid of the bitfield abuse
> aswell.

well, FWIW when I started looking at adding these flags I looked in various 
subsystems in the kernel and picked an implementation that suited. Guess what 
pci.h has? ...:

	unsigned int msi_enabled:1;
	unsigned int msix_enabled:1;

this is literally where I copied the example from

I suppose I can fix those, but I really don't understand what all the fuzz is 
about here. We're only conserving memory and staying far away from the real 
risks of bitmasks, so forgive me if I don't grasp the problem.

Honestly, if this is really considered "Bad coding" (TM) then we need to fix 
these prominent abuses of it too.

I count about 60 or so of these bitfields in drivers/net... (and countless more 
in other parts) !

Auke