Watching the discussion about Octeon patches submitted by Cavium Networks, it seems apparent the majority of the problems simply come from the fact that the code was written to be shared between multiple operating systems. Code for programming the low level details of hardware doesn't really change if the OS is Linux, VxWorks, BSD, or something else. I've found it very depressing that most of the comments basically come down to "this doesn't match the kernel coding standard, change it". Obviously rewriting code for every coding standard and OS is just a bug farm. Fixes will never get merged into all the rewrites. Cavium can't be the first to want to share code. We'd like Octeon to be well supported in the Linux kernel, but we'd also like other OSes to work well too. There has to be some sort of middle ground here. Our base "library" that is completely OS agnostic is actually license under the BSD license to allow maximum portability between various OSes. What have other people done before? Through the discussion on the Octeon patches a number of bugs have been uncovered and code has been improved. This part of the kernel submit process is truly great. It just bothers me that so much needs to be rewritten for arbitrary reasons. For example, there has been lots of complaints that we use typedefs throughout our code. Some people may not like them, but they have been useful in the past. Some code used to use structures to reference chip registers. Later due to new features, we found it necessary to change the struct to a union with anonymous members. Because of the typedefs we were able to change the fields for the new features without breaking compatibility with existing code. If we'd used "struct" everywhere instead of a typedef, all existing code would have to change for no other reason except to substitute "union" for "struct". Not everyone has the freedom of the kernel programmers to ignore code outside of the project. So far the code submitted for Octeon is fairly trivial. The idea of duplicating all of the network setup code for RGMII, GMII, MII, SGMII, 1000 base X, PICMG, XAUI, Higig, Higig2, etc is just plain scary. I'm sure I forgot a few in this list. There has to be a better way. Chad
