The USERs don't want to know what card they have or what driver they need or PCI IDs. That's all stuff that makes them say "Linux Bad, *****s good." (Yeah I know, there's the whole driver moreass there and PCI VENs too) but anyway...
The driver should have a name that reflects its use and capabilities.For example, bcm43xx is a reasonable name. I don't like it personally because the google links to the site (berlios.de) that tell me that's why I need took a while to find but that's just semantics.
bcm43xx_mac80211 is a less reasonable name. With respect to the coders who have put time into making this usable on by 4306 and almost usable on my 4311 I can say that I appreciate the effort... but the name needs work.
If I was king of driver package naming, the driver that works with v3 and v4 firmware and supports crypto functions would be... broadcom80211bg or bcm80211g
The driver that only works with v3 (aka bcm43xx) broadcomv3 The driver that only works with v4 (aka bcm43xx_mac80211) broadcomv4As time advances and bcb43xx_mac80211/broadcomv4 is brought to spec so it works great... its code would be integrated into broadcom80211g/bcm80211g.
That's my thinking. As a USER. As a linux advocate and zealot.I can tell you there are three things that are the #1 hindrance to massive Linux adoption
1. proprietary video cards 2. proprietary network cards3. the various sundry and astonishingly in-the-way and annoying network-managers.
If you can solve #2... you've eliminated 33% of the problem and maybe even helped with #3.
Go Lewis Hamilton @ Nurbugring Go Paul Tracy @ Edmonton Ehud Pavel Roskin wrote:
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:Yes, this preserves stability for happy bcm43xx users. Still takingActually, 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.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 :)Yes, this is probably worthwhile for those wishing to avoid PCI IDAlso, we could introduce a kernel option to enable support for new devices in your driver.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.
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