Pavel Roskin wrote:
Quoting Francois Romieu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Is there a reason why dev->mem_{start/end} should not be removed ?
Is there a reason why it should? Is it going to be obsolete?
It is slowly obsoleting for a few years (don't laugh...). It is preferred
to store the relevant address in the private part of the (pci) device.
Moderately recent drivers do not use it at all. However it's fairly common
in the setup code of the (legacy) isa devices.
I agree that many drivers don't use it. But it would be nice to have a document
describing what is going on. On one hand we are adding new information elements
(such as the bus in "ethtool -i"), on the other hand we are removing addresses
from the ifconfig output. Who is deciding which information is useful and
which is not?
Most of the ifconfig-exported stuff is obsolete, simply because most of
it is quite inappropriate for hardware more modern than ISA.
dev->mem_start has been a hacky way to pass options for over 10 years
now, since only few, rare drivers use it to specify the ISA memory
region for probing.
How about netdev->irq? Is it going to be obsolete too? Then I can easily
remove orinoco_pci_setup_netdev() with very minimal adjustments.
netdev->irq is obsolete as well. Some newer drivers don't even bother
to set it. With PCI, it became write-only, because modern drivers
autoprobe their irq, ignoring whatever the user requests. With PCI
MSI[-X] and even more modern hardware, dev->irq is just a cookie, not
something to program PCI_INTERRUPT_LINE with. So setting netdev->irq is
even less useful.
Programs which need to discover hardware information when given a
network interface name should do ETHTOOL_GDRVINFO, get the bus info, and
then obtain the information needed in a bus-specific way.
Jeff
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