On Mon, 2008-10-06 at 11:35 -0700, Greg KH wrote: > On Mon, Oct 06, 2008 at 11:23:13AM -0400, Dan Williams wrote: > > On Sat, 2008-10-04 at 23:16 -0700, Greg KH wrote: > > > On Sun, Oct 05, 2008 at 08:56:20AM +0300, Kalle Valo wrote: > > > > Greg KH <greg@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > > > In my quest to suck drivers into drivers/staging/ I noticed that the > > > > > at76_usb driver is being shipped by both Fedora and Ubuntu in their > > > > > kernels. > > > > > > > > Yes, that's the original at76_usb driver which has it's own 802.11 > > > > stack. Pavel Rosking was the maintainer of that driver. Based on the > > > > feedback in linux-wireless I then started porting the driver to use > > > > mac80211. > > > > > > > > (Maybe I should have renamed the port to something else than at76_usb > > > > because having two different drivers with the same name creates > > > > confusion.) > > > > > > > > > So I was wondering what the status of this driver is, and if I > > > > > could/should add it to drivers/staging/? > > > > > > > > The original at76_usb is working quite well, but it's unacceptable for > > > > the mainline because we cannot have two 802.11 stacks in kernel. > > > > > > I understand this, but for the issue of the drivers/staging/ tree, it's > > > ok for us to have as many 802.11 stacks in the kernel as we can cram in > > > there :) > > > > Well, you have to ask yourself then, what's the point of putting that > > driver with it's own 802.11 stack into staging when it's never going to > > go into the mainline kernel until it uses mac80211? > > Because at least 2 distros currently ship their kernels with it (Fedora > and Ubuntu), and people have that hardware today and want to use it with > Linux. > > > Doesn't that direct effort away from porting the driver to mac80211, > > giving legitimacy to code that will never, ever get upstream until > > it's substantially rewritten anyway? Ideally we put Kalle's 802.11 > > port in staging and then people can actually move things forward. > > > > Same thing for linux-wlan-ng really; if people just keep fixing bugs and > > keep improving p80211 without porting it to the standard kernel wireless > > bits, what's the point of having it in staging? > > Users using their hardware with Linux today. > > I'll gladly drop it from drivers/staging when the "real" version hits > mainline, until then, it should stay in staging, as that is the whole > point of it. It does nobody any good if (a) the drivers are _never_ going to go upstream, and (b) if the drivers aren't going to get any attention in their current form because of (a). I don't care if the driver allows peoples hardware to work; I want a driver that makes peoples hardware work _well_. Out of tree drivers that are never going upstream will not work well. Dan -- 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
