On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 01:55:58PM +0200, Hauke Mehrtens wrote: > If brcmsmac gets merged it should support all braodcom softmac wireless > devices with ieee80211n support, this includes also the N-PHY devices > with SB-bus, otherwise ieee80211n support has to be added to b43 and > then I do not see any advantage over just using b43 and removing > brcmsmac. Will Broadcom support these older chip in brcmsmac and also > all new devices still missing now or has the community to add support > for these devices without any help by broadcom? This requirement seems rather artificial. Vendors choose which devices they want to support. Intel has abandoned devices (e.g. ipw2100, ipw2200, and iwlegacy), and arguably so has Atheros (e.g. ath5k). Why should Broadcom be compelled to support older devices simply because there is some overlap between brcmsmac and b43? If they went down that path, would you then demand that they support the b43legacy devices as well? Why not? The strategy of cramming all vaguely similar devices under "one" driver doesn't have a great track record IMHO. We have had to split iwlwifi, and may have to do so again. e1000 got split similarly, as did b43/b43legacy. I see no reason to compel a driver to support an extended range of hardware when there are reasonable dissimilarities between the devices. > What are your plans in updating the PHY code in brcmsmac? As Rafał > mentioned your closed source linux wifi driver (wl) is ~6 months ahead > of brcmsmac now. For the last ~6 months the Broadcom team has been working on getting their driver out of staging. I have to believe that they would have rather been working on updating device support during that time. I can only presume that they would make that a priority in the long run. How many times has b43 been > ~6 months behind on it's hardware support? Despite Rafał's recent heroic efforts at improving that, I can't help but wonder how long will it be before b43 is again dreadfully behind? > Are you planing to replace your closed source linux driver with brcmsmac > on normal x86 desktops and Linux SoCs and will you support brcmsmac as > you did before with wl? I'm guessing that their customers will decide this for them, if we allow the customers to have a reasonable choice. John -- John W. Linville Someday the world will need a hero, and you linville@xxxxxxxxxxxxx might be all we have. Be ready. -- 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
