[PATCH] Add support for Marvell 8431 to 2.6.31 series

[Stefan Bader]

Sebastian Spaeth wrote:
> New netbooks (eg. the Hewlett Packard 5102) have a Marvell ethernet card
> (0x11AB:0x8431). Support for this card went into 2.6.33 (in the sky2
> driver), but not yet in 2.6.31. The upstreamed patches to support it has
> been taken into the Suse 2.6.31 kernel and work fine there.
> 
> Given that the 2.6.31 kernel is going to be used for quite some time, it
> would be great to also support this device and take the Suse patch
> (which is really just 4 kernel upstream patches).
> 
> The patches are here:
> http://gitorious.org/opensuse/kernel-source/commit/68c33163d0e1e7bf44cf0bb4c6b8497e944d7886
> 
> I filed a bug
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/537168
> 
> and attached the patches there as well. I also attach the upstream git
> patches to this email. WOuld adding that be difficult/controversial? It
> is in upstream, I can use it in my Suse Enterprise 11, and opensuse, but
> not in Ubuntu.... (yet)
> 
> Thanks for consideration,
> Sebastian
> 
> 
The 2.6.31 kernel is no LTS support and in fact will only be maintained now for
critical problems. Our next LTS release is based on 2.6.32. But this also now is
in feature freeze.
Looking at the changes required for this request alone looks more than would be
acceptable for normal stable release updates. At least not the normal kernel. At
most as a backports module.
Or you try to can try to convince upstream stable (stable at kernel.org) to accept
these. But normally there is also some reservations against taking big
enablement patches.

Stefan