Hello, Larry! First of all, many thanks for porting the v3 driver to mac80211! On Thu, 2007-07-19 at 20:38 -0500, Larry Finger wrote: > 1. For more general testing, I'll distribute my driver as a patch to > be applied to wireless-dev as > it needs ssb, which is not yet in mainline. If we are still in testing when ssb is merged, I'll > change to making patches against mainline. Sounds good. > 2. Once the problems have been cleared and ssb is in -mm, it gets sent there as a port from softmac > to mac80211 for the current bcm43xx. An additional consideration is that a port from softmac to > mac80211 will be more easily merged than if it looks like a new driver. I would prefer if the name stayed the same, but it shouldn't be a big deal. > 3. If the port of softmac to mac80211 is merged before Michael's driver, it will be known as bcm43xx > with bcm43xx-mac80211 remaining in wireless-dev. Yes, that's what I mean, keep it "bcm43xx" unless renaming it is the condition for acceptance. > 4. Once bcm43xx-mac80211 gets merged to mainline, then Michael's driver should become bcm43xx and my > driver gets its PCI IDs stripped to the 802.11b-only devices and once again becomes bcm4301. This > name change for Michael's driver would cause some disruption for current users as their firmware > would have the wrong name/version. That might be too much of a problem. Actually, the common practice is that the new driver that doesn't supplant the old driver immediately and for the whole range of hardware gets a new name. Think CONFIG_IDE vs CONFIG_ATA and eepro100 vs e100. Also, we could introduce a kernel option to enable support for new devices in your driver. > I think this is a path that always has a stable driver with at least moderate performance in > mainline throughout the entire transformation. That's a very good goal. I would also consider the option to use different names for v3 and v4 firmware. I have a file /etc/modprobe.d/bcm43xx that reads options bcm43xx fwpostfix=.3 options bcm43xx_mac80211 fwpostfix=.4 but we cannot expect every distro (let alone every user) to take care of the naming conflict. Users don't expect the need to rename firmware, and we shouldn't create a problem for them. -- Regards, Pavel Roskin - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
