[oe] Removal of the proprietary Intel IXP ethernet driver (ixp4{00, 25}-eth, ixp-osal, ixp4xx-csr) from OE

Rod Whitby rod at whitby.id.au
Tue Jan 23 05:40:32 UTC 2007


For a long time, the only way to use the internal ethernet port for
ixp4xx devices was to use the proprietary intel driver.  The driver
could not be linked with the kernel, and tainted the kernel.

Thankfully, that has now changed with the development of the open source
ixp npe kernel driver, which is GPL and can be freely linked with the
kernel.  Note that the microcode firmware blob (ixp4xx-npe) which needs
to be loaded by the driver is still Intel Proprietary and requires a
click-through license on any firmware image that includes it.

The ixp4xx-kernel package (as of 2.6.19) now supports this new driver.
It has been tested on the NSLU2, NAS100d, and Loft devices, and as of
the 0.3.1 version is considered stable.

Accordingly, I propose to remove the Intel Proprietary driver from the
OpenEmbedded metadata.  I also propose to remove versions of the
ixp4xx-kernel earlier than 2.6.19.

The following packages will be obsoleted, and then removed:

ixp425-eth/ixp400-eth_1.4
ixp425-eth/ixp400-eth_1.5
ixp425-eth/ixp400-eth_1.5.1
ixp425-eth/ixp425-eth_1.1
ixp425-eth/ixp425-eth_1.2
ixp4xx/ixp-osal_1.5
ixp4xx/ixp-osal_2.0
ixp4xx/ixp-osal_2.1
ixp4xx/ixp-osal_2.1.1
ixp4xx/ixp4xx-csr_1.4
ixp4xx/ixp4xx-csr_1.5
ixp4xx/ixp4xx-csr_2.0
ixp4xx/ixp4xx-csr_2.1
ixp4xx/ixp4xx-csr_2.1.1
linux/ixp4xx-kernel_2.6.15.3
linux/ixp4xx-kernel_2.6.16
linux/ixp4xx-kernel_2.6.17
linux/ixp4xx-kernel_2.6.18

Any objections?

[Note that this will not affect anyone's ability to build from the
SlugOS binary release source code archives - they are in SVN.]

-- Rod






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