On Sat, Jul 6, 2019 at 4:00 AM Sergio Paracuellos <sergio.paracuellos@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Out of curiosity, if it's not too complex an answer to go into, what's > > the benefit of the staging-next driver? Is there a reason to prefer it > > to the 4.2 driver? > > In terms of stability, the driver which is in staging-next now is not > always working as expected, > so I really apologize for that because main changes have been done by > myself. In the other hand, > you have to think what is staging tree for. Staging contains drivers > that are not ready to be properly > mainlined into the "real" tree because they are not clean enough, the > use old apis and so on. The idea > of staging is to have a temporal place to properly clean drivers in > order to get them properly added into > the official mainline tree and directories. Doing that it will always > be supported in the kernel and it won't be > deleted for the tree. The mt7621 pci driver is now clean enough to > give it a try to be mainlined but we have to > achieve the problem of pci link stability that sometimes gets the > driver to hang. I'm sorry, I think my question was unclear! I am not complaining about the instability introduced in the current driver. I understand that dealing with hardware is complicated and sometimes things are broken for a while -- especially in staging or experimental drivers. That doesn't bother me! I am curious, though, about the motivation for this change -- obviously there must be some reason you rewrote the driver, but it's not at all clear to me. I see that with the staging driver it looks like maybe the 4.20 driver was split into the PCI controller driver and a separate PCI PHY driver? If that's the main architectural change, what's better about splitting them up that way? Again, I understand that sometimes a question sounds really simple but the answer is long and involved, and I don't want to take up a lot of your time or energy. So if it is more complicated than a thirty-second explanation, that's cool. -- Brett Neumeier (bneumeier@xxxxxxxxx) _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://driverdev.linuxdriverproject.org/mailman/listinfo/driverdev-devel
