Re: Testing requested for the next version of GNU Mach

[Richard Braun]

On Mon, Mar 07, 2016 at 11:01:47PM -0500, David Michael wrote:
> Yes, this was when booting gnumach in QEMU with -device rtl8139 for a
> net device.

Here is the situation :

At some point in 2006 (but apparently merged in 2009), netdrivers,
the network drivers written by Donald Becker, were updated to version
3.5. For some reason, rtl8139 has this bug that we apparently didn't
have in the past. Since then, we've been using netdde, more recent
Linux drivers running in user space, by default as part of the Debian
packages.

I can clearly reproduce the bug, which seems specific to this particular
driver. However I'm completely unable to find any netdrivers code except
our own. The driver was replaced with 8139too in Linux around 2.2/2.3.

In any case, this isn't a regression caused by my work, and I don't
intend to fix in-kernel drivers, in particular when we have a good
user space replacement. As a result, I suggest we remove the rtl8139
driver from the kernel.

-- 
Richard Braun