On 11/06/2006, at 6:55 PM, Hans Verkuil wrote:

Unrelated to linux. It's just what happens when a driver is developed
outside the kernel and then you want to integrate it. Same thing would
have happened with BSD or any other OS. I don't like it either but I
see no other option. It's a big driver, it required many changes in the
kernel, some really low-level, and it requires developing a whole new
API for MPEG devices. This is the consequence of that. The end result
will be great, but the intermediate steps are no fun.

And I admire the work you've been able to do. This is not intended in any way as a jibe or troll, but I don't quite understand the purpose of integrating ivtv with the kernel. Does it mean that in the long term:

* patches cannot be made to ivtv except as part of the regular kernel releases * every update of ivtv is tied to a specific version of the kernel, so it becomes impossible to upgrade ivtv without upgrading every other kernel module and the kernel itself. This is what bit me because I updated the kernel for another reason, was then forced to upgrade ivtv and things were never the same again.

This is probably a discussion for another place, so don't answer if it is off topic. I just don't quite understand the movable feast that is the Linux kernel API. There appears to be little to no effort put into backward compatibility. The suggestion given to many problems in the Linux world is "are you running the latest kernel?"

There is an assumption in Linux world that updating the kernel is easy to do, and always results in improvements. I maintain a bunch of 5 year old FreeBSD 4.x installations in a data centre. Sure I'll upgrade them to new versions when I can schedule the appropriate down time and testing, but otherwise the OS is still supported and I can still keep updating server software running on it without rebuilding the kernel except for security patches. Anyhow, this isn't meant to be a competition, just a comparison against what I'm more used to. And I guess ivtv is a little different to many other hardware drivers such as network or disk drivers.


Anyway, I've taken a quick look at your earlier posts and it looks like
the cx25840 module is missing. Is it loaded? (check with lsmod)

tv ~ # lsmod | grep cx
cx25840                21904  0
firmware_class          7552  2 ivtv,cx25840
i2c_core 15888 12 it87,i2c_isa,nvidia,ivtv,wm8775,saa7127,saa7115,msp3400,tveeprom,tuner,t da9887,cx25840

It does appear to be loaded, but I can't see how to switch on any more debugging for that module. I tried "options cx25840 debug=1" but that didn't work. I am pretty sure I am loading the correct version:

tv modules.d # modprobe -v cx25840
insmod /lib/modules/2.6.16-gentoo-r2/kernel/drivers/media/video/ cx25840/cx25840.ko


The second card (PVR-250) loads fine, but that one is cx23415 based.

Ari Maniatis


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