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From: Bodo Eggert <7eggert@gmx.de>
Subject: Re: forcedeth: option to disable 100Hz timer (try 2)
To: Mikhail Kshevetskiy <mikhail.kshevetskiy@gmail.com>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       Ayaz Abdulla <aabdulla@nvidia.com>, Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>
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Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:16:02 +0200
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Mikhail Kshevetskiy <mikhail.kshevetskiy@gmail.com> wrote:

> On some hardware no TX done interrupts are generated, thus special
> 100Hz timer interrupt is required to handle this situation properly.
> Other device do not require that timer interrupt feature.
> 
> Forcedeth has a DEV_NEED_TIMERIRQ flag to mark the broken devices.
> Unfortunately, nobody know the actual list of broken devices, so all
> device has this flag on. Other problem, this flag is not user visible,
> so the kernel recompilation is required to disable timer interrupts and
> test a device.

Why don't you disable the interrupt after the first TX_done interrupt
(no RX pending, no RX done)? Maybe you can printk "forcedeth device [x,y] does
not need timer interrupts, please send this line to you@example.org", too.
Maybe you can even disable it if no TX is to be done.

OTOH, this fix is available, it's possibly the best to use it for now.