On Thu, 2007-03-22 at 08:58 -0400, John W. Linville wrote: > > Although it's unfortunate that I cannot test dadwifi and bcm43xx on the > > same kernel. It's quite bad, especially on the slow G3 PowerMac. > > Why not? The wireless-dev kernel still has the softmac bcm43xx driver, > as well as the mac80211-based bcm43xx driver.
I mean, I want to test the latest bcm43xx to see is the "machine check is gone". It's quite common for somebody to wish to download, compile and install the driver without the hassle of patching the kernel, especially a vendor kernel or an embedded kernel that's hard upgrade, or a kernel that takes hours to compile. For a quickly progressing driver, having a standalone distribution could be very convenient for both users and developers. Users of exotic processors could catch the bugs x86 hides. > > > We will need one for the day when mac80211 replaces softmac in the > > > mainline kernel. What would we > > > need to do? > > 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? I would say the softmac version should stay in the tree. Firstly, it supports older hardware. Secondly, it's a point of reference, which is useful until the driver is quite stable. But most importantly, bcm43xx_mac80211 has some issues that bcm43xx doesn't have. I have to disable 802.11g modes just to use it. I'm not sure if it's related, but bcm43xx_mac80211 emits this warning on startup: bcm43xx_mac80211: !WARNING! Idle-TSSI phy->cur_idle_tssi measuring failed. (cur=9, tgt=62). Disabling TX power adjustment. I'm not really an expert here, but it looks like a very hard problem to me. I just don't see any practical approach to fixing it. I don't think it can be assumed that it will just go away. Having a mac80211 driver with v3 firmware would be a first step at bisecting the bug, but I guess it would be very time consuming. On the other hand, it could replace the softmac driver eventually. -- Regards, Pavel Roskin _______________________________________________ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
