Re: [PATCH v5] Add new mac80211 driver mwlwifi.

[Kalle Valo <kvalo@codeaurora.org>]

Maxime Bizon <mbizon@freebox.fr> writes:

> On Fri, 2015-07-03 at 06:10 +0000, David Lin wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
>> The Linux driver for WRT1900AC. The work was initially developed as
>> part of openwrt effort and maintained on
>> https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi.
>
> I see *massive* code duplication with the mwl8k driver.

I haven't looked at the driver myself yet. Do you have any estimates how
much duplication there is?

> This is, I guess, not a surprise since the supported chipset are an
> evolution of the ones supported by mwl8k, just look at how close/similar
> the descriptor format is.
>
> The problem is that each new Marvell chipset comes with a new firmware
> version, and there is no effort to have a common firmware API or code
> base that supports multiple chipsets.
>
> That pushes the bloat on the kernel side, do we really agree on that ?

That is a very good question. The kernel should not be a dumping ground
for random drivers which duplicate lots of code but this is a sort of
gray area and depends on the case.

Did Marvell reply to this? I didn't find any comments about this.

-- 
Kalle Valo