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Date:      Thu, 02 May 2002 18:42:06 -0700
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To:        Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org>
Cc:        Bill Fenner <fenner@research.att.com>, phk@critter.freebsd.dk, arch@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: PHY patch, please test. (was Re: savcore dump names?)
Message-ID:  <3CD1EAEE.D3E8DC94@mindspring.com>
References:  <20020503003255.0C5213810@overcee.wemm.org>

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OK, this is a seperate thread...

It probably belonged here, and not on -current, in the first
place.

Peter Wemm wrote:
> Better check, he's about to gut functionality from miibus too.  Since it
> doesn't affect common cards, we are not likely to find out if or how badly
> it breaks things until 5.x gets released.
> 
> http://phk.freebsd.dk/patch/phy00.patch


You commented on this already on the -current list:

] So, in a nutshell, you removed the ability for the card driver to request
] the phy driver to wait for negotiation to complete, and removed the
] interlock that prevents duplicate negotiation requests when the negotiation
] took longer than the allotted time?

To which he replied "yes and yes".

This question by you, and his response, sent up the red flags
for me.


I saw your initial objections to him committing the code (above),
and I agreed with them.

However, he made the point that there are a number of very long
delays (500ms) which will occur at link-up time.  I really
agree with these being bogus, so if he can remove them, and is
willing to do the work, it's a good thing.  These are half
second stalls ... enough to trigger an IP takeover by an IP
redundancy protocol, which would be incredibly degenerate
behaviour.

He also made the point that:

| There is no such thing as duplicate autoneg requests, if you send a
| new one (like we do after the 5 or 10 sec timeout) the negotiation
| starts over.

I don't know if this point is valid, without further discussion'
this fails to address his "shoulds"... the fact is that, "should"
or not, until the drivers are fixed to be able to work that way,
ripping out the working code is a bad idea.  His:

| And as you said yourself: there is additional NEWBUS'ing to be
| done in this area.
[ ... ]
| Volounteers welcome.

Was pretty omenous, in this context.

(See?  I basically agree with you.)

BUT... you didn't respond to his response.  You just let it sit
there.  This implied to me that he had satisfied you, and that
if I had complained that it didn't satisfy me, I'd have both of
you on my case about it.

This posting is actually the first indication of your continued
objection to the commit of the code, as far as I can see from
the list archives and my -current inbox.

It wasn't really clear to me whether or not he was proposing to
implement the "much more capable state engine", as a response
to your complaint, or whether he was leaving it as "an exercise
for the student".

Do you intend to respond to his posting, in context, on the -current
list, or do you just intend to complain about the patches, using them
as examples of "bad things Poul has done or intends to do"?

If you want examples of "bad things Poul has done", IMO, well, I
have a long list, and Julian has a long list, and I'm sure we
can all complain about each other for a very long time.

Personally, I would really *hate* for his miibus changes to go in
without answering your objections, but leaving your objections
hanging there with his reasponse going unanswered is just asking
for them to be committed.  He has some valid points, but I'm not
sure that his approach of breaking it and letting people who care
about it pick up the pieces will work.  It certainly didn't when
the X.25 and ISODE code was broken under similar circumstances by
partial routing code changes, back in the mid 1990's.

If this is a policy issue, then make it a policy issue, but it's
going to have to result in a policy that applies equally to everyone.

-- Terry

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