Re: iwl4965 and driver merging policy

[Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 11:39:27AM +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> 
> Just a little question in the light of the discussion we had at Kernel
> Summit about merging drivers upstream (and here, I strongly agree with
> Linus, hence my message).
> 
> I just got that new T61 laptop which happens to have an iwl4xxx chip.
> The distro I installed on it (ubuntu) has a driver for it. I suspect
> others do too and most users get it from some random external tree and
> use it.
> 
> Thus my question, why are we about to release 2.6.23 without it ?
> 
> It doesn't seem to pull any depedency nor affect any other external
> piece of code unless I'm missing something, so it's a perfect example of
> what we've been discussing back then: there is just no point not merging
> it at any time right ? :-)

Well, pulling in iwlwifi would require also pulling in the mac80211
subsystem, so it's not quite that simple (although I'm not sure what's
holding back that going into the kernel.)

I had no problem building my personal production kernel by taking
2.6.23-rc8, and doing a git pull from the everything branch in John
Linville's wireless-dev git tree.  It's probably too late to pull it
for 2.6.23-rc8 (although if Linux wanted to do it it's only one git
pull command away :-), but it would be really nice if it could get
merged in for 2.6.24.

						- Ted