On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 01:31:59PM -0500, Pascal Renauld wrote:
> Well, it's just that we had some issues with specific hardware and felt 
> that the hardware was much better supported in the em driver. The current 
> NetBSD driver is 3500 lines against 11400 for the one coming from FreeBSD. 

3X the total line count, in a device driver, sounds to me like a pretty
persuasive argument *against* using the larger driver.  ;-)

> The lower layer part of the driver (5000 lines) is dedicated to tuning of> 
> the different boards.

I'm sure there's some work to be done here, because I've already noticed
significant performance differences between, for instance, the PCI-X versus
the standard PCI adapters in the same machine, seemingly to do with their
default tuning for different PCI bus configurations.  But I can't imagine
that that could possibly justify a vastly more complex and enormously
larger driver that doesn't actually provide any features the current
driver doesn't also provide...

Thor