Hi !
Just a little question in the light of the discussion we had at Kernel

Summit about merging drivers upstream (and here, I strongly agree with

Linus, hence my message).
I just got that new T61 laptop which happens to have an iwl4xxx chip.

The distro I installed on it (ubuntu) has a driver for it. I suspect

others do too and most users get it from some random external tree and

use it.
Thus my question, why are we about to release 2.6.23 without it ?
It doesn't seem to pull any depedency nor affect any other external

piece of code unless I'm missing something, so it's a perfect example of

what we've been discussing back then: there is just no point not merging

it at any time right ? :-)
Cheers,

Ben.
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You must not have been watching me SPAM netdev for the past two
It is queued for 2.6.24.  I'm not even sure it was originally posted

in time for the 2.6.23 merge window, but even if it was there was

a lot of opposition to merging it until fairly recently.  In fact,

I'm sure there are still some wireless developers that are less than

happy about merging it now.
Anyway, coming soon to a kernel near you...
John

--

John W. Linville

linville@tuxdriver.com

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Allright, thanks. I was mostly trying to figure out where we standed

with this whole idea that driver additions were not necessarily

constrainted by the merge window (which I think is fair to do) and this

looked like a good example to pick since it affects my new laptop :-)
Out of curiosity, what's the main source of opposition ? Since it's

being shipped by distro or built out of tree by most users -anyway-, I

think it's pretty clear that we'd be better off having it merged asap

rather than trying to figure out what random version was included by

users/distros and try to support it, in addition to wider exposure & all

the yadada of being upstream in the first place.
Ben.
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There have been a lot of spats about how functionality has been

partitioned between the driver and the firmware, issues with how the

driver tries to do things that either ought to be in mac80211 or not

done at all, and some random complaints about ugliness like '#include

"../../../net/mac80211/blah.h"', etc.  There is still plenty of work

to be done on this driver, but as you point out we are better-off

with it in the kernel than with it out.
Thanks,
John

--

John W. Linville

linville@tuxdriver.com

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Well, pulling in iwlwifi would require also pulling in the mac80211

subsystem, so it's not quite that simple (although I'm not sure what's

holding back that going into the kernel.)
I had no problem building my personal production kernel by taking

2.6.23-rc8, and doing a git pull from the everything branch in John

Linville's wireless-dev git tree.  It's probably too late to pull it

for 2.6.23-rc8 (although if Linux wanted to do it it's only one git

pull command away :-), but it would be really nice if it could get

merged in for 2.6.24.
						- Ted

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Hi Ted,
sorry? mac80211 is already in the tree, isn't it?
Thanks,
--

Jiri Kosina

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I though that was already in 2.6.23 ... my bad if I missed something
Yes, I agree -rc8 seems to be a tad too late, I'm just surprised we

didn't get it in earlier though since it seems it's been around and

useable for some time.
Cheers,

Ben.
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