Re: PATCH 2.5.4 i810_audio, bttv, working at all.

Jeff Garzik
2002-02-13T17:19:50Z

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> But many of them are barely working, written by people who don't care
> about the rest of the kernel (or even about the driver itself, they just
> wanted to have a working machine and forget about it), and if we make
> those kinds of drivers do extra work, it's just not going to work.

Which is why, IMO, we should endeavor to make drivers as cookie-cutter
and dirt simple to create as possible. It will probably take many
months, but I would like to continually factor out from the net drivers
not only common code but -design patterns-.

As an experiment a couple months ago, I got most of the PCI net drivers
down to ~200-300 lines of C code apiece, by factoring out common code
patterns into M4 macros. "m4 netdrivers.m4 epic100.tmpl > epic100.c"

I would prefer to make drivers so dirt simple that people don't need to
worry about details like PCI DMA API changes...

Jeff, dreams on

--
Jeff Garzik | "I went through my candy like hot oatmeal
Building 1024 | through an internally-buttered weasel."
MandrakeSoft | - goats.com