On Thu, 2008-01-24 at 13:34 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Thu, 24 Jan 2008, John W. Linville wrote: > > > > There is no great harm in reverting > > 81100eb80add328c4d2a377326f15aa0e7236398 if you would like to go ahead > > and push the 2.6.24 release. I suspect, however, that the mac80211 > > guys would like to keep it (or put it back for 2.6.25) to continue > > to shame driver developers in the future. > > I'd be happy to have it back in the development tree, I just don't want to > have the noise for a release tree. I guess I should speak up, having added that warning :) We had a huge discussion a while ago concerning alignment of packets when somebody noticed that on sparc64 the zd1211rw driver was causing alignment faults in the IP stack. During the discussion, I noticed that hardly anybody of the wireless driver developers knew about the alignment constraints and so I added this warning to make people aware of when they would run into problems on platforms like sparc and arm that can't do unaligned loads (or only with extreme penalties). I had myself been considering to revert this patch for the .24 release as you've done now, so I definitely don't have a problem with that. All drivers except the Intel ones have been fixed, and they are in the luxurious position to be able to fix their firmware. I can see that might take a while longer than posting a quick fix and honestly I had hoped they'd post a quick fix so their hardware is usable on platforms like arm/sparc that can't do unaligned loads, no such luck, however. Please revert the revert after .24 though, there are quite a few alignment constraints and we'd like to check them automatically. Also, with 11n there is yet another constraint and John has just merged a patch from me that checks for those constraints as well. Since the only problematic driver is Intel's, they really should be able to get their act together for .25 and fix their firmware, if not then we'll have to think of something else like making their drivers memmove() the packets to the right place. johannes
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