From: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>
To: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>
Cc: Franky Lin <frankyl@broadcom.com>,
gregkh@suse.de, devel@linuxdriverproject.org,
linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/20] staging: brcm80211: 7th reaction for mainline patch #2
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2011 15:21:14 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <1316524874.3953.41.camel@jlt3.sipsolutions.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20110920130338.GA9885@kroah.com> (sfid-20110920_150440_808230_86E73445)
On Tue, 2011-09-20 at 06:03 -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> And while code is great and nice, I still haven't seen any real answers
> to all of the questions that were asked of the Broadcom driver team
> during that review by the linux-wireless developers about how things
> will be handled properly due to the overlap in functionality with the
> existing "real" driver in the tree.
Let's qualify this to "some developers".
One thing I'd like to point out is that the Broadcom's firmware API has
always undergone changes over time. I'm actually surprised that b43
works as well as it does (which, tbh, isn't very well at all, at least
for me with some 11n PHY). I also don't think that Broadcom are going to
maintain compatibility and/or maintain new firmware features for old
devices, that just doesn't make any sense.
As a consequence, I don't think there's any sense in saying b43 should
be the driver that Broadcom must support upstream. Even we, back then,
split b43 into b43 and b43legacy when it wasn't really possible any more
to test and maintain a single driver for different devices. Rafal has
shown that it is possible today (to some extent) to do that for the
newer chips and the older 11g only chips that b43 still supports, but
I'm not convinced that with new features like P2P this will be true in
the future.
And this is just discussing the technical side -- the support side is an
entirely different question.
Now, don't get me wrong -- I don't think the duplication is a good
thing. A lot of the PHY code could be shared. However, I think it will
probably not be possible for much longer to share the higher level MAC
code that programs the SHM etc.
So I don't claim to know what the solution is, but I think simply
rejecting the Broadcom effort like most people seem to imply is a good
solution at all. It will leave all of us in a bad spot by creating a
driver that has to support too many different devices.
johannes
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2011-09-20 13:21 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 66+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2011-09-19 21:25 [PATCH 00/20] staging: brcm80211: 7th reaction for mainline patch #2 Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:25 ` [PATCH 01/20] staging: brcm80211: sparse endianness warnings on dongle events Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:25 ` [PATCH 02/20] staging: brcm80211: various fulmac sparse endianness fixes Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:25 ` [PATCH 03/20] staging: brcm80211: sparse endianness warnings for struct brcmf_proto_cdc_ioctl Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:25 ` [PATCH 04/20] staging: brcm80211: sparse endianness warnings for struct sdpcm_shared Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:25 ` [PATCH 05/20] staging: brcm80211: more fullmac sparse endianness scan related changes Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:25 ` [PATCH 06/20] staging: brcm80211: remove unconditional code blocks from brcmfmac Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:25 ` [PATCH 07/20] staging: brcm80211: remove event handler thread from fullmac Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:25 ` [PATCH 08/20] staging: brcm80211: remove fullmac module_param brcmf_dongle_memsize Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:25 ` [PATCH 09/20] staging: brcm80211: remove fullmac module_param brcmf_sdiod_drive_strength Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:25 ` [PATCH 10/20] staging: brcm80211: remove fullmac module_param for watchdog Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:25 ` [PATCH 11/20] staging: brcm80211: remove fullmac module_param brcmf_idletime Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:26 ` [PATCH 12/20] staging: brcm80211: remove global variables for data frame boundary Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:26 ` [PATCH 13/20] staging: brcm80211: removed two fullmac sparse spinlock warnings Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:26 ` [PATCH 14/20] staging: brcm80211: added endianness check flag to fullmac Makefile Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:26 ` [PATCH 15/20] staging: brcm80211: removed likely/unlikely calls Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:26 ` [PATCH 16/20] staging: brcm80211: removed log after kzalloc()/kmalloc() failure Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:26 ` [PATCH 17/20] staging: brcm80211: clarified fullmac io and event codes Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:26 ` [PATCH 18/20] staging: brcm80211: consistent naming of struct net_device *ndev Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:26 ` [PATCH 19/20] staging: brcm80211: simplified internal ioctl function once more Franky Lin
2011-09-19 21:26 ` [PATCH 20/20] staging: brcm80211: reduced checkpatch warnings to zero Franky Lin
2011-09-20 0:04 ` Joe Perches
2011-09-20 0:59 ` Joe Perches
2011-09-20 1:12 ` Franky Lin
2011-09-20 1:04 ` Franky Lin
2011-09-20 13:03 ` [PATCH 00/20] staging: brcm80211: 7th reaction for mainline patch #2 Greg KH
2011-09-20 13:21 ` Johannes Berg [this message]
2011-09-20 13:36 ` John W. Linville
2011-09-20 13:45 ` Rafał Miłecki
2011-09-20 13:40 ` Rafał Miłecki
2011-09-20 13:50 ` Rafał Miłecki
2011-09-20 20:56 ` Rafał Miłecki
2011-09-20 21:12 ` Alex Deucher
2011-09-20 21:23 ` Rafał Miłecki
2011-09-21 23:26 ` Luis R. Rodriguez
2011-09-21 13:40 ` John W. Linville
2011-09-21 13:52 ` Rafał Miłecki
2011-09-21 13:55 ` Rafał Miłecki
2011-09-21 14:39 ` Larry Finger
2011-09-20 13:22 ` John W. Linville
2011-09-20 14:00 ` Greg KH
2011-09-21 18:33 ` Brett Rudley
2011-09-21 20:01 ` Rafał Miłecki
2011-09-21 22:12 ` Brett Rudley
2011-09-21 22:35 ` Michael Büsch
2011-09-21 23:15 ` Brett Rudley
2011-09-21 23:28 ` Michael Büsch
2011-09-22 2:07 ` Brett Rudley
2011-09-22 6:36 ` Rafał Miłecki
2011-09-22 8:53 ` Arend Van Spriel
2011-09-22 8:57 ` Rafał Miłecki
2011-09-22 9:10 ` Arend Van Spriel
2011-09-22 9:12 ` Rafał Miłecki
2011-09-22 10:07 ` Jonas Gorski
2011-09-22 13:39 ` Arend Van Spriel
2011-09-22 9:44 ` Johannes Berg
2011-09-22 10:29 ` Michael Büsch
2011-09-22 6:47 ` Hauke Mehrtens
2011-09-22 9:04 ` Arend Van Spriel
2011-09-22 9:08 ` Rafał Miłecki
2011-09-22 10:38 ` Michael Büsch
2011-09-22 6:54 ` Rafał Miłecki
2011-09-22 7:24 ` Rafał Miłecki
2011-09-22 7:28 ` Rafał Miłecki
2011-09-22 14:31 ` Christoph Hellwig
2011-09-22 18:37 ` Arend Van Spriel
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