Enabling drivers in staging tree in rawhide

John W. Linville linville at redhat.com
Thu Jan 8 16:45:22 UTC 2009


On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 10:35:42AM -0500, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 07:17:30AM +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> 
>  > Related: I raised the staging problem already in
>  > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=477927
>  > as rawhide contained the at76 driver as separate patch
>  > http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewvc/rpms/kernel/devel/linux-2.6-at76.patch?view=markup
>  > -- but the same driver (with two small changes) also was part of the 
>  > upstream kernel since October/2.6.28-rc as one of the staging drivers:
>  > http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=99e06e372378c5833a0c60274b645dfb2e4a4b08
>  > (for more details see bug).
>  > 
>  > That sounds wrong to me, as
>  > 
>  > - it's duplicated work
>  > 
>  > - the at76 staging driver from upstream taints the kernel; the driver 
>  > from our patch doesn't.
> 
> The wireless stuff, I've pretty much deferred to the wireless maintainer, John Linville.
> I don't know the backstory behind at76, but it's been lingering for
> quite a while, and it would be nice to see it go away yes.
> I'm not clear on why this is going through -staging instead of wireless-dev either.

at76 looked like it was going to have a working mac80211-based
version some time ago.  The mac80211 port happened, but it broke the
driver... :-(

The version in -staging actually came from the Fedora kernel, so
enabling it and dropping our patch isn't such a bad idea.  I was
concerned that the busted mac80211 port of it might come back (and it
seem to have done so for now in 2.6.29), so I was leaning against it.
(I'm still mostly against that unless we can get the mac80211 port
backed-out of 2.6.29...)

Now Kalle Valo says he is working on a new mac80211 port of
that driver, and that he intends to rename it to avoid confusion.
I presume that will get to Linus through my trees when it becomes
available and hopefully at76_usb will disappear from -staging then.

Does that clear-up anything? :-)

John
-- 
John W. Linville
linville at redhat.com




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