Survey: Linux kernel quality [LWN.net]

Survey: Linux kernel quality

Posted Jul 10, 2006 3:28 UTC (Mon) by cventers (subscriber, #31465)
Parent article: Survey: Linux kernel quality

The only real bug I've been grappling with is one in sky2 that is causing
TX hangs. I hope to find some time to work on it personally as I think the
maintainer can't reproduce the issue (though I know of at least one friend
who has the same problem).

The biggest difficulty I'm aware of here is that it is still sometimes
hard to get your hands on hardware documentation. If I could personally
get some of the docs necessary, I might be able to take a better stab at
the problem.

So I would say that interaction with hardware vendors remains our biggest
problem.

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Survey: Linux kernel quality

Posted Jul 10, 2006 9:46 UTC (Mon) by gvegidy (subscriber, #5063) [Link]

drivers for sky2 seem to be hard to get correct.

the driver written by syskonnect/marvell themselves (sk98lin) works for
only about a day on one of my systems, I gave up contacting their support
after a bit of useless back and forth. A colleague told me that even their
windows driver sometimes hangs.

The moment Stephen Hemminger took up developing a clean linux driver I
thought the problems will be gone soon. But it looks like it's still a way
to go.

So stay away from sky2 nics if you can...

sky2

Posted Jul 10, 2006 11:18 UTC (Mon) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link]

I spent a large part of the last couple of weeks watching the tennis by streaming MPEG from DVB-S out over my local network with a sky2 card. I didn't have a single lockup from the sky2. In fact, I'm listening to the radio the same way now, because I haven't bothered moving the satellite cable back to the standalone receiver box.

This is with the current Fedora (2.6.17) kernel, which I believe has no patches to the sky2 driver.

sky2

Posted Jul 11, 2006 17:29 UTC (Tue) by unaiur (guest, #3563) [Link]

To watch a dvb channel over a gigabit ethernet card isn't any serious
test.

I've usign a traffic generator over these cards and they hang before
processing 1 billion packets (about 10 minutes). These cards are buggy
(or at least, the dual port PCI Express x4 card).

sky2

Posted Jul 11, 2006 20:07 UTC (Tue) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link]

To watch a dvb channel over a gigabit ethernet card isn't any serious test.

True. I mention it mainly because it used to fail.