On Fri, 2007-07-20 at 09:44 -0400, John W. Linville wrote: > On Fri, Jul 20, 2007 at 12:43:16AM -0400, Pavel Roskin wrote: > > 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... :-) b43 bcm43 bcm4k3 bcmwifi bcmwlan bcm80211 brcm43xx broadcom I really like the minimalism of b43, which plays well with b44 and p54 :) > > 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. Yes, I used to hearing complains that orinoco steals IDs from hostap. Then it became popular to blacklist orinoco modules. Quite a disgrace for the driver! Having "weak" IDs for Prism based cards would have avoided it. But please realize that the problem goes far beyond PCI. Perhaps you have heard of CONFIG_USB_LIBUSUAL, which selects the best driver for USB storage devices, either the slow but reliable ub, or the SCSI based usb-storage, which it too fast for some cheap sticks. It even has a parameter called "bias", which allows to control how conservative the algorithm should be. That would be hard to emulate with "weak entries", but I hope that "bias" is an overkill. > 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. Yes, that sounds good. -- 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
