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Re: ath0 patches for Eee PC



On Thu, 5 Jun 2008, Eric Haszlakiewicz wrote:
On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 03:25:45PM +0100, Stephen Borrill wrote:
On Thu, 5 Jun 2008, Joel CARNAT wrote:
Upgrading to yesterday's 4.99.64/i386, I saw that the patches
referenced in the NetBSD Eee PC support page for the ath0
interface are not included in the source tree.

Is this expected or has submit been forgotten ?

The HAL for the ath in the Eee is a) i386-only and b) incompatible with
other ath devices. So no, it's not been committed.

So wouldn't this be considered just another machine specific driver, like
the many others that are already in the tree?

No, because it's the same ath driver but with a different core HAL (and a slightly modified interface). ath doesn't support switchable HALs, therefore they can't (easily) co-exist in a source tree. I looked at making it switchable, but paths to the HAL are pretty pervasive throughout the ath tree and build machinery. Therefore, I cheated by (pretty much) copying all the ath stuff and renaming the copy to atheee. This allows me to build kernels with ath OR kernels with atheee from the same tree (but not both, of course).

Hopefully there will be an official all-encompassing release in the
future at some time.

Is it actually possible to have an all-encompassing HAL for the ath?
I got the impression that is wasn't.  (not that I've really been paying
all that much attention to what's being going on with it, since I don't
have an Eee PC)

I don't see why not, but it would need to encompass all the different architectures (even though that chipset might never be used on non-x86).

--
Stephen



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