On Thursday 22 March 2007 20:35, Larry Finger wrote: > Michael Buesch wrote: > > On Thursday 22 March 2007 13:58, John W. Linville wrote: > >> Why? What value do you predict in having an out-of-tree softmac > >> version available? Would that effort be better spent on improving > >> the in-tree mac80211 version? > > > > Once mac80211 is merged we probaby need a (out of tree?) fork of the > > bcm43xx-softmac to support old 802.11b cards. The new driver can't > > support this anymore (issues with firmware. It's simply too hard > > to support both architectures in one driver). > > We could probably still leave a stripped down bcm43xx-softmac > > in the kernel, though that would require for softmac to stay there, too. > > I lean towards doing an out of tree tarball to get the legacy stuff > > out of the main kernel tree. Larry, some opinion? > > To me, continuing support of 802.11b cards is a given. > > Knowing that there are problems with SoftMAC that will never be fixed, I > think it should be removed > from the kernel. Leaving it there would encourage its use and give the wrong > impression. I have no > problems with my continuing to support an out-of-tree version. Of course, I > hope that the number of > API and ABI breakages would be minimal. To my knowledge, the current code > base provides close to > optimal performance with the 802.11b cards. Of course, there is only one in > our data base and they > are not that abundant. > > Pavel clearly favors an out-of-tree solution over a patch set to add > bcm43xx-softmac back into a > source tree. That is OK with me. > > Developing a V3 firmware driver for 802.11b devices doesn't seem to be > viable. From what I see in > the latest versions of the specifications, support for 802.11b devices is > disappearing from the > Broadcom drivers. Thus, I think a standalone bcm43xx-softmac solution would > be best.
Ok, nice. So what if you start to prepare such an out-of-tree tarball? Such a tarball would: - Contain softmac code. - bcm43xx-sm code. - Makefiles to build all these as modules against the installed kernel. - Probably some compatibility stuff to make it compile against older kernels. - Would have all A and G devices ripped out of the PCI device ID list (important!) Besides that I would _not_ remove all A and G code (phy code and stuff), as that introduces a too high risk of breaking things for so little gain (slightly smaller module). You can look at the old SVN repository on berlios to get a Makefile for out-of-tree build for the driver. I think softmac and bcm43xx-sm should be in one tarball and should be built together with one make invocation. Just "melt" the codebases together. :) Ah, and yeah. There is the issue of symbol clashes with bcm43xx-mac80211. Is that an issue when built modular? We should make life of distributors easy by allowing both bcm43xx-sm and bcm43xx-mac80211 be loaded at the same time. Does that sound reasonable? Or should I do it? -- Greetings Michael. _______________________________________________ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
