Messages in this thread | | | From | "Rafael J. Wysocki" <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH 3/3] net: wireless: bcm43xx: big_buffer_sem semaphore to mutex | Date | Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:18:43 +0100 |
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On Saturday, 15 of December 2007, Michael Buesch wrote: > On Saturday 15 December 2007 01:51:47 Rafael J. Wysocki wrote: > > On Friday, 14 of December 2007, Michael Buesch wrote: > > > On Friday 14 December 2007 13:59:54 Simon Holm Thøgersen wrote: > > > > > This user did get the following messages in dmesg: > > > > > > > > > > b43err(dev->wl, "Firmware file \"%s\" not found " > > > > > "or load failed.\n", path); > > > > > > > > So the question seems to be why b43 needs version 4, when b43legacy and > > > > bcm43x uses version 3? > > > > > > That's really a question, right? > > > > > > Well. linux-2.4 doesn't work with the linux-2.6 modutils. > > > Windows Vista doesn't work with Windows 98 device drivers. > > > That leads to this assumption: > > > b43 doesn't work with version 3 firmware but needs version 4. > > > > > > Newer drivers supporting newer hardware need newer firmware. > > > > Actually, can you explain why, from the technical point of view, the version 4 > > firware is better than version 3, please? > > version 4 is the new firmware released by broadcom. They obviously won't > support and write any version 3 firmware anymore. So we are forced to > switch to version 4 firmware to support the newest hardware (like N-PHY > in the future). It's really as simple as that.
I see, thanks.
> The difference between v3 and v4 is basically the driver API. It changed > a lot and it is nontrivial to support both v3 and v4 in one driver. > So we decided to stay with v3 for legacy devices and take v4 for any newer > devices.
This is reasonable, yes.
> We have to live with that crap until someone comes up with an opensource > firmware. :)
Well, the only problem with that is I suspect there are some "newer" cards that work better with v3 firmware, although they are supposed to support both.
Greetings, Rafael -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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