Re: Status of cx18 drivers, mercurial vs in-kernel

[Dale Pontius <DEPontius@edgehp.net>]

Andy Walls wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-08-09 at 16:56 -0400, Dale Pontius wrote:
>> I've been running the cx18 drivers out of mercurial since getting my
>> HVR-1600 running, almost a year ago.  As I see things, the driver is
>> pretty mature now, and in fact I see commits for cx18 in 2.6.31 that are
>> some of the last I saw going into the "regular" driver in mercurial.
>> (I'm not counting the diagnostic work that has been going on in the last
>> month or two, for one particular user.)
>>
>> Is it reasonable to go with the in-kernel cx18 driver when 2.6.31 goes
>> stable, or is there still significant value with sticking with mercurial?
> 
> As long as 2.6.31. has the following changes, then go with 2.6.31:
> 
> 1. per stream queue mutex locks changed to per quueue spinlocks, and an
> outgoing message work handling thread was added
> 
> 2. front end SIF audio AGC actually uses the SIF signal for setting the
> SIF audio AGC
> 
> 3. Sliced VBI works and can be enabled for insertion into all MPEG II PS
> type streams
> 
> These were that last major fixes I can think of that made a difference
> for anyone.  I'd imagine they are all in 2.6.31 by now, but I haven't
> checked.
> 
> I don't know of any existing major problems with the cx18 driver itself.
> The bad problems that seems to crop up now are usuaully system level
> issues: a vmalloc pool that is too small, sharing an interrupt line with
> another linux driver that has an interrupt handler with a poor response
> time, etc.
> 
> Future changes to the cx18 driver might include:
> 
> 1. MPEG Index support
> 2. Dual-watch audio support
> 3. Additional cards type or fixing up exsting broken entries 
> 4. Sliced VBI in an MPEG TS stream (maybe)
> 
> Regards,
> Andy
> 
> 
>> Dale Pontius
> 
> 
The changes I see listed for 2.6.31 are:
11864 Complete support for Sliced and Raw VBI for 625 line systems
11950 Split LeadTek PVR2100 and DVR3100H into 2 separate card entries
11951 Add DVB-T support for the Leadtek WinFast DVR3100H
12182 Add DVB-T support for Yuan MPC-718 cards with an MT352 or...

This changelog appears to start with your #4, so I'm guessing that the
older stuff is already committed.

Thanks,
Dale