[elrepo] Interest in kmod package for lan78xx?

[Phil Perry]

On 20/06/17 22:32, Björn Gerhart wrote:
> Hi Phil,
> 
>> Apart from the warnings below, does the device behave as expected? Is it working OK?
>>
> Yes, in fact the device seems to work properly like expected.
> 

Great. I've moved the package from the testing repo to the main elrepo 
repository.

>> The microchip.ko module is required so please leave it loaded, it is the corresponding PHY driver.
>>
> ok.
> 
>>
>>> Maybe the slowpath warning results on the fact that el7's 3.10 kernel has some backports implemented which the vanilla 3.10 kernel doesn't?
>>
>> I'm not sure there is anything I can do about that. Microchip's driver isn't a standalone driver, but rather a set of patches to be applied against a 3.10 kernel, and the complete kernel rebuilt to include the new lan78xx driver. I've striped out the driver code from their patches, and backported any missing functions, but there were other patches to other parts of the kernel including workqueue that I'm not able to port.
>>
>> I would be tempted to also file an RFE with Red Hat, requesting they backport this driver into the RHEL kernel. If you are lucky, they may agree and you may get native support in the RHEL 7.5 kernel (way too late for 7.4 now).
>>
> Alright. However, I’m very happy that due to the el7 issue our hardware developers decided to switch to the Realtek chip RTL8153 instead, which support is included in el7’s kernel anyway. I was really surprised to hear that, because usually it’s the other way round.
> Thanks a lot for your help and the discussion although!
> 

Cool. Another chipset that should be natively supported in el7 is the 
ASIX AX88179 chipset. I'd love to get samples of devices based on these 
chipsets to try out. I had a look on Amazon, but it's not always easy to 
determine which chipset devices are based upon.

> (hopefully the mail this time is in simple ASCII format)
> 
> A big thank you and best
> Björn
> 

You're very welcome :-)