Measuring the impact [LWN.net]

Measuring the impact

Posted Mar 8, 2007 5:14 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104)
Parent article: Who's writing 2.6.21 and related issues

If we consider the impact of the changes, all that metric is meaningless. For me personally, 2.6.21 will be the first kernel to support Broadcom wireless card in my laptop reliable enough for day-to-day use with real life access points, without any patches and tricks. Many thousands of users will be able to dump ndiswrapper and stop running Windows software in kernel mode on their laptops (and maybe on some desktops too).

Yet people who made it possible are not in any top-list. That's probably because the Broadcom driver has been in the kernel for some time. What's being done now is perhaps the hardest part, namely fixing the bugs that were preventing the driver from working. Some bugs affect only specific revisions of the hardware, so the developers must rely on users' reports or actually buy that hardware.

Painstaking as it is, debugging the hard problems doesn't generate many commits, not does it change many lines of code. Yet that's what makes the most difference.

Those two developers need to be mentioned in the comment since they are not in the article. Many thanks to you, Larry Finger and Michael Buesch!

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bcm43xx

Posted Mar 8, 2007 6:04 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Hear, hear!

That's not to say that the bcm-4311 in my Dell actually works right yet. My latest experience is that the bcm43xx driver works only after bcm34xx-d80211 has been loaded and then unloaded. Evidently the latter code knows more about how to turn the hardware on. In particular, the indicator LED only operates after that driver has been loaded. However, it's the bcm43xx driver that succeeds in communicating with the hub.