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Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2011 17:12:10 -0400
Message-ID: <CADnq5_OBLpQigLX1zqh5NGyW6crJO3G5xyBEnu+CwVxac-dkYQ@mail.gmail.com> (sfid-20110920_231214_612116_CF806CAC)
Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/20] staging: brcm80211: 7th reaction for mainline patch #2
From: Alex Deucher <alexdeucher@gmail.com>
To: =?ISO-8859-2?Q?Rafa=B3_Mi=B3ecki?= <zajec5@gmail.com>
Cc: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>, gregkh@suse.de,
	linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org, devel@linuxdriverproject.org
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Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org

2011/9/20 Rafał Miłecki <zajec5@gmail.com>:
> 2011/9/20 Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>:
>> On Tue, 2011-09-20 at 06:03 -0700, Greg KH wrote:
>>
>>> And while code is great and nice, I still haven't seen any real answers
>>> to all of the questions that were asked of the Broadcom driver team
>>> during that review by the linux-wireless developers about how things
>>> will be handled properly due to the overlap in functionality with the
>>> existing "real" driver in the tree.
>>
>> Let's qualify this to "some developers".
>>
>> One thing I'd like to point out is that the Broadcom's firmware API has
>> always undergone changes over time. I'm actually surprised that b43
>> works as well as it does (which, tbh, isn't very well at all, at least
>> for me with some 11n PHY). I also don't think that Broadcom are going to
>> maintain compatibility and/or maintain new firmware features for old
>> devices, that just doesn't make any sense.
>
> Actually, when we got some single response from Broadcom about their
> relation to b43, they haven't mentioned support for old HW is any
> problem at all.

If you look at it from the perspective of a hardware manufacturer,
supporting EOLed chips is generally not a good return on investment.
There is no new revenue associated with them so any work that goes
into them stands to return very little.

Alex