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SubjectRe: Winmodem support
On Fri, 14 Aug 1998, Bob Lorenzini wrote:
> By purchasing this garbage you become part of the problem by
> encouraging the manufacturers to continue merchandising bogus hardware.
> Vote with your wallet.

Calling it garbage is a bit extreme. It's purely a cost issue: lower
manufacturing costs by offloading the work to the CPU. This makes the
hardware extremely attractive for consumers and vendors alike; because of
the lower cost, people buy more, and hence the vendors see more volume.

These things do have a technical bonus though; being able to more closely
integrate the driver code for the modem with the networking code. This
should, in theory, lower overall latency since the modem doesn't need a
timeout to mark the end of a stream of data; you can probably shave nearly
50-70 ms off the whole transaction that way. On an analog line, that's
nothing to scoff at.

The downside, of course, is that you're -really- going to want to run such
driver code as a realtime task, since by it's very nature, it's going to
be timing sensitive. Does anyone know if those things at least provide
some kind of internal buffer, for while the OS is catching up?

To address the part about "I hope we never support this kind of hardware",
I only have to say that it's a sad day when Linux hardware support is
determined by the things we like, as opposed to the things people have.
Look at some of the ethernet drivers (such as the 3c501); these things are
garbage, generally speaking, but people who have them generally don't have
a whole lot of choice about the hardware they've had lumped on them. So,
we (or the unfortunate owners of that equipment) support it.

And, the old argument holds here too: if it's hardware drivers -you- don't
need, don't worry about it. You can compile it out. Just like sound, ISDN,
SCSI, etc.

--
-------------------. emarshal at logic.net .---------------------------------
Edward S. Marshall `-----------------------' http://www.logic.net/~emarshal/

Linux labyrinth 2.1.115 #4 SMP Fri Aug 14 00:58:56 CDT 1998 i586 unknown
10:35pm up 45 min, 3 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00



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