Re: [PATCH 1/7] Adding empia base driver

["Markus Rechberger" <mrechberger@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 12:09 AM, Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 11:14:36PM +0200, Markus Rechberger wrote:
>>     em2880-dvb:
>>     * supporting the digital part of Empia based devices, which
>> includes ATSC, ISDB-T and DVB-T
>
> <snip>
>
> Doesn't this driver duplicate some of the existing devices we already
> support with the current in-kernel driver?  If so, why not just add the
> new device support to the existing driver instead of duplicating
> everything?
>
> This is going to cause a big problem for distros as they will not know
> which to enable, so they will probably just disable this one, which is
> what I don't think you want to have happen :(
>

the current driver doesn't support most devices which are in there,
also the alsa
audio driver can easily crash the whole system. (It's my code so I
know what was wrong there).

The core video code is already too much off, the VBI code added alot complexity
to it it does frame slicing on the fly.

Those devices ship VBI+VIDEO within 1 datastream, VBI and Video aren't
that different
in the system. both interfaces provide framebuffers through a mmap'ed interface.
If all the VBI buffers are filled the data has to be sliced off in any
case while providing
the same bottom data ot the Video interface

http://mcentral.de/hg/~mrec/em28xx-new/shortlog (there are more than
200 changelog entries
what happened in detail).

The development has been split off (first due limitations in the
kernel, afterwards due ..., and finally
due the restriction that all that has to work without a framework
upgrade on the eeePC).

diffing the 2 available drivers shows up that only the core is twice
as big as the one which is currently
in the driver (the result of 2-3 years asynchronous development).

The driver is currently also tested with signal generators (different
inputs, and different video standards).

Very likely the best would be to replace the available driver with it
but I don't care, alot people use and have been using the driver from
mcentral.de for a long time, development has always been opensource
there too.

regards,
Markus