Re: firmware discussion

[Rui Paulo <rpaulo@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 30 Mar 2010, at 14:17, Joe Talbott wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 12:03:44PM +0100, Rui Paulo wrote:
>> 
>> On 3 Mar 2010, at 17:57, Rui Paulo wrote:
>> 
>>> On 3 Mar 2010, at 17:11, Joe Talbott wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hi all,
>>>> 
>>>> I'd like to open a discussion regarding our firmware API.  What are
>>>> people's thoughts on FreeBSD's firmware API?  Is it worth the effort
>>>> to import FreeBSD's API, or are there not so many drivers using
>>>> loadable firmware?  My personal feeling is that we should do whatever
>>>> we can to make porting drivers as easy as possible.
>>> 
>>> From the point of view of wireless drivers, more and more will be using firmware interfaces and you'll likely benefit from importing the firmware(9) interface from FreeBSD. Since wireless drivers will need to be ported again from FreeBSD due to the massive net80211 changes I have on my branch, a new firmware interface will probably be needed.
>> 
>> This still holds. Are you going to import the firmware interface from FreeBSD?
> 
> Yes after the release and a bit more testing.  I also have a few
> changes to your net80211-update branch that I needed to get ratectl to
> work for the wpi driver I'm porting.  I try to get a patch together so
> you can check it out.

I'm unhappy with the ratectl stuff, really. I think it needs to be rewritten to cope with the changes to the ratectl algorithms from FreeBSD. The other route would be to ditch wlan_ratectl and keep everything in sync with FreeBSD.

--
Rui Paulo