Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:27:10 -0500
From: Giridhar Pemmasani <giri@lmc.cs.sunysb.edu>
To: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [2.6 patch] i386: always use 4k stacks
In-Reply-To: <20051115185543.GI5735@stusta.de>
References: <1132020468.27215.25.camel@mindpipe>
	<20051115032819.GA5620@redhat.com>
	<43795575.9010904@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<20051115050658.GA13660@redhat.com>
	<43797E05.5090107@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<17273.34218.334118.264701@cse.unsw.edu.au>
	<4379846E.2070006@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<20051115141851.18c2c276.grundig@teleline.es>
	<1132061045.2822.20.camel@laptopd505.fenrus.org>
	<dld3cs$1sh$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<20051115185543.GI5735@stusta.de>
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On Tue, 15 Nov 2005 19:55:43 +0100, Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> said:

  Adrian> And the fact that it might force people to help with the
  Adrian> development or at least use open source drivers for their
  Adrian> hardware instead of binary-only Windows drivers isn't
  Adrian> exactly a disadvantage for the development of Linux.

IMO, this is at best only one side of the coin: Many people that ask
for help with ndiswrapper seem to be newbies that have just begun
using Linux. Most of these people can't/won't help with development of
native drivers. On the other hand, ndiswrapper can be used in reverse
engineering. I know of at least two such cases. So thinking
ndiswrapper as a scourge that hinders development (I am exaggerating a
bit here, but it has been suggested so by certain people more than
once on lkml) is not correct. Informed users, especially those that
follow lkml, are more interested in helping development of native
drivers and would chose to use native drivers if possible. Leaving
other end users high and dry without wireless support until such
drivers are available is not necessarily helpful for development of
open source drivers.

In essence, ndiswrapper is for those chipsets that have no open source
drivers until one can be developed.

This issue raises a concern for me as developer of ndiswrapper. I
perceive that some kernel developers have strong opinions against
ndiswrapper. I see ndiswrapper as contributing my 2 cents - I have no
vested interests in ndiswrapper, although it will be sad to see lot of
effort and time put into ndiswrapper go waste. However, I believe
there is a need for such a project: There is a company (Linuxant) that
sells a product similar to ndiswrapper, ndisulator, which is similar
to ndiswrapper, is merged into FreeBSD kernel, and ndiswrapper itself
has been downloaded more than half a million times from Sourceforge
alone. And not all native drivers support all the features that users
need, e.g., WPA, whereas ndiswrapper supports all features provided by
vendor for Windows driver. And there are chipsets for which open
source drivers may not be available ever since they are rare. And if
it takes many months/years to develop a stable open source driver,
users need some way of using their hardware until then. And so on. I
am not trying to argue in favor of ndiswrapper at the cost of open
source drivers, but that there is a genuine need for such a project,
at least for now.

This is neither a complaint nor a plea; if option to chose 8k stacks
is dropped in the kernel, so be it. If I find time to provide support
for private 8k stacks within ndiswrapper, I will do that, so that if
this patch makes into kernel, users who need some way of using the
wireless cards can do so, for now.

  Adrian> Unconditionally enabling 4k stacks is the only way to
  Adrian> achieve this.

I think this is a bit drastic. As I suggested earlier, making 4k
stacks the default may be enough. For example, RedHat already
distributes kernels with 4k stacks and I am not sure if you will get
lot more cases, considering the popularity of RedHat.

-- 
Giri
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