Re: Staging, place holder for better company/community development model

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1383 bytes --]

On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 22:00 -0700, Greg KH wrote:

> > Except it doesn't work for most of the wireless drivers you've sucked in
> > without asking any wireless developers whether that makes any sense or
> > not.
> 
> Any specific examples?

wlan-ng is the largest example, it's a load of crap, much of it being a
driver for hardware we already have drivers for, and the remaining
hardware being mostly unavailable these days. The driver served it's
purpose at a time, but the authors had years and years of time to bring
it in and never bothered. It needs to be incorporated into a
rearchitectured orinoco driver, or so.

I also remember objecting to rt2860/rt2870, and the only good thing that
has come out of adding those is a spatch that might otherwise not have
been applied to those drivers. Afaict, no new people have helped with
rt2800, the rt2x00 based driver for this hardware, because they've come
in contact with rt2860/rt2870.

I don't remember any discussion about rtl8187se either.

All of those bring their own 802.11 stack, and changing to the Linux one
will /necessarily/ require an entire rewrite of the drivers because the
stacks operate /completely/ differently. Even the clean, in-kernel
bcm43xx driver was rewritten to b43 for mac80211, and rtl8187se ships
the old ieee80211_softmac code that I and a few others wrote...

johannes

[-- Attachment #2: This is a digitally signed message part --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 836 bytes --]