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Message-ID: <3C6AA01A.51517C48@mandrakesoft.com>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 12:19:22 -0500
From: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@mandrakesoft.com>
Organization: MandrakeSoft
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To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
CC: "David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com>, dalecki@evision-ventures.com,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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
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