Jeff Garzik wrote:
Chris Snook wrote:
Hey folks --

I've begun cleaning up the atl2 vendor driver for merging. It's very similar to the atl1 driver, and needs a lot of the same work, though I have already fixed the 64-bit DMA data corrupter that atl1 users remember so fondly. Right now this is very raw, and there is a large amount of cosmetic work to do to make it more maintainable, but it should generally work, at least as well as the vendor driver does.

While this is in pre-submission cleanup mode, the latest standalone source tarball and patch (currently against 2.6.23) will be available here:

http://people.redhat.com/csnook/atl2/

If you have atl2 hardware, please give this a spin. I plan to submit the driver for merging some time in the next month or so. Questions, comments, patches welcome.

Why not update atl1 for this new hardware?  Why is a new driver needed?

    Jeff

They have some common hardware at the PCIe level, but at the ethernet level it's totally different (simple, low-power 100 Mb vs. Gb with all the bells and whistles). We'd end up special-casing all over the place, because they have rather different capabilities, like, say, if we tried to merge ixgb and e1000 (which have a lot of code in common). It could be done, but I don't think it would be beneficial. If Atheros decides to maintain the in-tree drivers directly, and wants to take it in that direction, I won't object, but from where I sit, on the other side of the planet from the guys with the chips hooked up to the hardware analyzers, separate drivers seems less painful.

        -- Chris
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