Return-Path: MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <201304081733.15727.chunkeey@googlemail.com> References: <201304081733.15727.chunkeey@googlemail.com> Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2013 12:00:12 -0700 Message-ID: Subject: Re: Version number policy! From: Adrian Chadd To: Christian Lamparter Cc: Eugene Krasnikov , Kalle Valo , "Luis R. Rodriguez" , linux-bluetooth , linux-wireless , ath9k_htc_fw , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 Sender: linux-bluetooth-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On 8 April 2013 08:33, Christian Lamparter wrote: > On Monday, April 08, 2013 11:10:30 AM Eugene Krasnikov wrote: >> It?s a good idea to pack bitmap into the tail/header of the firmware >> binary to get capabilities even before fw loading. The plan is to add >> 8 bytes for caps and also add time stamp. Let me play around with that >> and provide fw and driver patch for review. > > Hm, come to think of it. Kalle, do you think ath9k_htc could use > some bits of the fw header format, parser or the complete infrastructure > from ath6kl? This could be great for Adrian, because he could > just point people to it and they could moved it into the code > into /drivers/net/wireless/ath/fw.c. Just remember that we (ath9k_htc and carl9170) aren't constrained by the same kinds of issues that closed firmware is. So version checks aren't that bad, because that way over time we don't end up needing to maintain lots of special cases for firmware options. I still like the idea of firmware options for build time options that people may wish to use - eg, say we want to support a version of ath9k-htc firmware that does offloaded TX rate control, versus not. But, maintaining multiple builds of the same firmware is IMHO going to be a path towards madness to maintain. The maintainability is why I'm hoping (!) to keep the number of options low and just do "clean slate" moves whenever we shift to the next major firmware version. Adrian