[RFC] [Maverick] e1000e driver update to support 82579 LOM's

[Leann Ogasawara]

Hi All,

It's been requested that we update the e1000e driver in Maverick to
enable support for 82579 LOM's [1].  The patches to enable support
already exist upstream and are included as of 2.6.36-rc1.  I was advised
however to *not* just cherry-pick the two patches [2] which I originally
felt were necessary.  The reason being is that testing and validation
from the original patch authors is done against the tip of the stack
from which the patches are applied.  Thus by only cherry-picking a few
patches in between, it invalidates any of their testing and they can't
guarantee the resulting driver we then ship in Maverick is "approved".
This could then have unintended consequences where we've inadvertently
introduced issues which would otherwise not have existed. It was advised
to instead backport ~20 patches between v2.6.35 and v2.6.36-rc1 for the
e1000e driver.

I've taken the liberty to backport these 20 patches to our Maverick
kernel [3].  There was only 1 minor conflict that needed fixing up, the
rest were clean cherry-picks.  I've subsequently built a test kernel and
verified this indeed enables support for an 82579 LOM.  Additionally,
I've tested this kernel on an older system which also leverages the
e1000e driver and confirmed there were no regressions that I was able to
see.

I'd like to get the team's feedback if they feel applying these 20
patches to the main distro Maverick linux kernel tree seems reasonable
or if I should instead pursue enabling this LOM through
linux-backports-modules.  

Thanks in advance,
Leann

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/601044
[2] d3738bb8203acf8552c3ec8b3447133fc0938ddd e1000e: initial support for 82579 LOMs
    96f2bd13bfb6df5beec7fe55405ad94b528b8b4c e1000e: correct MAC-PHY interconnect register offset for 82579
[3] git://kernel.ubuntu.com/ogasawara/ubuntu-maverick.git lp601044-all