Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 13 Feb 2002 12:19:22 -0500 | From | Jeff Garzik <> | Subject | Re: PATCH 2.5.4 i810_audio, bttv, working at all. |
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Linus Torvalds wrote: > But many of them are barely working, written by people who don't care > about the rest of the kernel (or even about the driver itself, they just > wanted to have a working machine and forget about it), and if we make > those kinds of drivers do extra work, it's just not going to work.
Which is why, IMO, we should endeavor to make drivers as cookie-cutter and dirt simple to create as possible. It will probably take many months, but I would like to continually factor out from the net drivers not only common code but -design patterns-.
As an experiment a couple months ago, I got most of the PCI net drivers down to ~200-300 lines of C code apiece, by factoring out common code patterns into M4 macros. "m4 netdrivers.m4 epic100.tmpl > epic100.c"
I would prefer to make drivers so dirt simple that people don't need to worry about details like PCI DMA API changes...
Jeff, dreams on
-- Jeff Garzik | "I went through my candy like hot oatmeal Building 1024 | through an internally-buttered weasel." MandrakeSoft | - goats.com - 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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