Re: Linux Wireless Mini-Summit -- Ottawa -- July 22, 2008

[Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com>]

On Tue, 2008-07-15 at 14:14 -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Dan Williams wrote:
> 
> > Some of the issues with the current Marvell 83xx GPL drivers that have
> > gotten out are (a) code style, (b) lots of commented out stuff that's
> > never used, (c) OS abstraction that's unnecessary on Linux, (d) doesn't
> > use mac80211, and (e) uses private ioctls.  So hopefully you're writing
> > a new 83xx driver from scratch :)
> 
> Yes, this is all from scratch.  The objective for this work is to be 
> "mainlinable".
> 
> > We cleaned up a lot of stuff for the OLPC 8388 libertas driver, but
> > unfortunately we never were able to get the Marvell 8388 team onboard,
> > and so they just went off and kept working on their driver and didn't
> > really move the upstream libertas driver forward at all.
> 
> Libertas is a rather different beast.

Obviously; this was just an observation about the last time we got a
wireless driver from Marvell.  I expect it to work out rather
differently this time simply on the strength of your and Lennert's
track-record, but if it's really just you two guys and you don't have
buy-in from the actual hardware and software teams inside Marvell, it's
hard to see how this wouldn't just happen again.

Dan