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You need the efika.forth Firmware patch to successfully use the new ethernet driver.
The openSUSE guys removed the EFIKA ethernet dirver, as non functional, in 'factory' :-) I hope, it will be included again with the next snapshot. 'efika.forth' should be publicized a bit more...
Tell them to put it back because it's a firmware bug and not a driver bug.
We can't publicise it more than it is being; everyone who does this stuff (Olaf etc.) already knows of it, and there is too much politiking around on who should shoulder the burden of fixing the bugs.
One Linux distro might remove support for ethernet.
One might require efika.forth and explain nicely how to use it.
One might recode it into a Linux patch and C code.
One might just whine about how our firmware doesn't support this, and Yaboot, and lots of other stuff, and refuse to support us.
Then the distro that was nice, will drop support for the architecture completely, or the developer will leave, and we start again.
I wrote the script to appease the guys on the LinuxPPC list who insisted that device tree hacks should be done in firmware and if possible very quickly removed from Linux. That goal has been done; we can remove the device tree fixups from Linux right now, and using efika.forth, the system will work wonderfully.
However now we have to convince the distro guys to ditch Yaboot and use GRUB2 since Yaboot cannot load efika.forth before it loads Linux, we have to explain to the users how they must run and load the script to get stuff to work, they will need GRUB2 which they will refuse to supply in distros because it is "unstable"..
All in all, it's too much politiking for me. We make one set of developers happy and another one jumps up and down angry at us.
The script is there for use. If they are really motivated to support Efika they will find a way to use it. If they are not, then we lose, but nobody here seems to want to do the work. I don't mean at Genesi - if we had the time or resources we would fix the firmware instead.
We gave away hundreds of boards and I don't see anyone really going out and fixing up Linux distros or submitting patches or releasing driver fixes at all, except those (Grant, Sylvain and Domen) who already pledged to do this before the Efika release.
And especially I see nothing from the guys who had projects pertaining to Linux kernel development and distribution support.