Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1759680AbXLOLA3 (ORCPT ); Sat, 15 Dec 2007 06:00:29 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753431AbXLOLAR (ORCPT ); Sat, 15 Dec 2007 06:00:17 -0500 Received: from vs166246.vserver.de ([62.75.166.246]:38430 "EHLO vs166246.vserver.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753097AbXLOLAO convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Sat, 15 Dec 2007 06:00:14 -0500 From: Michael Buesch To: "Rafael J. Wysocki" Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/3] net: wireless: bcm43xx: big_buffer_sem semaphore to mutex Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2007 11:57:43 +0100 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.6 Cc: bcm43xx-dev@lists.berlios.de, Simon Holm =?utf-8?q?Th=C3=B8gersen?= , Daniel Walker , akpm@linux-foundation.org, Ray Lee , matthias.kaehlcke@gmail.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux@bohmer.net, kjwinchester@gmail.com, jonathan@jonmasters.org, Ingo Molnar References: <20071213003028.676998182@mvista.com> <200712141404.24275.mb@bu3sch.de> <200712150151.49025.rjw@sisk.pl> In-Reply-To: <200712150151.49025.rjw@sisk.pl> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200712151157.44278.mb@bu3sch.de> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1785 Lines: 40 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. 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. We have to live with that crap until someone comes up with an opensource firmware. :) -- Greetings Michael. -- 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/