On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 6:01 PM, Johannes Berg <johannes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, 2012-08-20 at 10:53 -0500, Larry Finger wrote: > >> I'm still concerned about the bigger picture. I can understand that the -5 >> version was experimental, but why was a driver released that needed a firmware >> version that could never be obtained? If any driver version needs a particular >> firmware, the fw must be available as long as anyone might be using that driver. >> To me, that means forever. > > Well, yes. That firmware, however, never was never available publicly. > The fact that the driver was released anyway is due to us working on the > driver upstream while working with the experimental internal firmware. > > johannes Perhaps we should add a Kconfig option to disable internal development hardware - with that option unchecked, support for hardware that is not on the market is disabled, with a printk warning to upgrade the driver in case a user tries to use a driver with a card that it thinks is internal-only. This way, users will get a meaningful error message, rather than a misleading "missing firmware" one. The Kconfig option should also come with a big warning of "Say N unless you are an Intel employee". Maybe it should even be marked BROKEN, like N-PHY was in b43 before it became usable. -- 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
