On Fri, Jul 20, 2007 at 12:43:16AM -0400, Pavel Roskin wrote: > On Thu, 2007-07-19 at 20:38 -0500, Larry Finger wrote: > > 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. Yes, this preserves stability for happy bcm43xx users. Still taking suggestions for the new name for bcm43xx-mac80211... :-) > Also, we could introduce a kernel option to enable support for new > devices in your driver. Yes, this is probably worthwhile for those wishing to avoid PCI ID conflicts between the drivers. I have also been speculating that perhaps we need an option for a secondary PCI ID table, so that a driver could support a large range of PCI IDs but then gracefully bow-out if another driver had a certain ID in its primary table. Does that make any sense? It would seem to be applicable to a number of drivers in the kernel. > 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. Yes, we should probably start using a default value for fwpostfix. As dwmw2 suggested, it would also be nice to fall back to an empty fwpostfix if the firmware is not found w/ the default extension. John -- John W. Linville linville@xxxxxxxxxxxxx - 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
