Re: bcm43xx regression in 2.6.24 (with patch)

Michael Buesch
2008-02-23T22:21:49Z

On Saturday 23 February 2008 22:32:46 Alexey Zaytsev wrote:
> > The insults being? A few quotes, please.
> If you really want to know, the
> "Because the new driver works, if you just set it up right."
> for me was clearly a hint that I'm just an other imcompetent
> user, who can't even follow the instructions from linuxwireless.org.

Well. That's 99% of all bugreports I receive. You will understand
that I won't explain the same crap that's written on linuxwireless.org
over and over 20 times each day to random people.
And yes, you belong to the group of my "random people", as I don't
remember your name from the top of my head.
So in 99% of the cases the user did something wrong.

But I still don't see the insult.

> And you knew that the new driver did no work with the bcm4311
> chips, which is the sad thing.

That is not true. It doesn't work with exactly _one_ revision
of the bcm4311 card. And that is already fixed in 2.6.25.
I'd like to have that in .24-stable, too, but I guess it's too big.
It changes some parts of the DMA engine code.

> Not true at all. I my first and second emails, there was not a single word
> about who broke the driver. There were only the fix, and the explanation,
> why the fix is needed. I really appreciate the work done on the b43 driver,
> and I'd emmediately switch to it, if only it worked for me*.

Yeah. But I don't like that patch. Then people came and said stuff like
I _have_ to accept it because it fixes stuff I broke. Excuse me, but
nobody can force me to sign off a patch that I am not completely
convinced of. _Even_ if it turns out that a commit made by me
broke something. Especially, if there's already another fix for the
situation queued up in the development kernel.

> I'm the one person who investigated the problem, wrote a
> patch and sent it to the lkml. After lurking in #bcm-users
> for a day, I saw quite a few users asking why the b43 driver
> did not work for them, and the best answer they got, was
> got read the linuxwireless.org. Are you sure they all were
> just unable to upgrade the firmware?

Yeah. Experience shows that. Read the archives.

> And by the way, the bcm4311 and b44 combination is not
> something I assembled just to piss you off. It's what HP puts
> in their HP Compaq nx7300 laptops. They were like the
> cheapest Core Duo laptops a year ago, and I'm sure they were
> not exclusively made.

So be it. And you guess what? We already sent a fix for those
people upstream a long time ago. It is in 2.6.25.

> > So let's
> > apply a questionable fix for it that we don't understand. Hopefully
> > that fixes it and doesn't break it again for somebody else... .
> >
> > I provided an alternative fix. In my very first email.
>
> Sorry, your fix does not work for my hardware. And you know it.

Did you _ever_ even try it?
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download

--
Greetings Michael.