Linus Torvalds wrote:
> End result: bad organization for the new hardware, inability to sanely
> take advantage of the full features of the new hardware. Forcing people to
> leave old code in place, because it is work-arounds for bugs in hardware
> three generations gone. People end up having to thread very lightly
> because the developer probably has access to all the new stuff, but
> doesn't even have a way to test the old stuff any more - except by having
> users holler when he broke it by mistake when he added code to handle new
> cases.
>
> Face it. Every once in a while, you have to start afresh. Tell people that
> "Ok, we can't share this code any more, it's getting to be a major
> disaster".
Linus,
You're right. Starting afresh helps a lot. Everytime!
However, (for example:) the fact that every serial driver in Linux has
to do its own hangup and carrier detect logic stinks.
You've designed good interfaces that allow us to efficiently call the
"write" routine of whatever device we're talking to.
Similarly, I don't think we should have a quantum.c to talk to Quantum
drives. Talking to quantum drives is similar enough to talking to
maxtor drives that one driver should be able to handle it.
So, it's all a question of degree.
I think that we need to share more code in the serial driver. Have a
clean interface that reduces most serial drivers by 2000 lines-of-code
or so. Are we at 1 bug per 600 LOC yet? That's three less bugs.
I agree, maybe we should rethink the IDE driver. But NCR53c875 and
SYM53C895 are close enough to be handled by one driver. So it's a
matter of degree.
Roger.
-- ** R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl ** http://www.BitWizard.nl/ ** +31-15-2137555 ** *-- BitWizard writes Linux device drivers for any device you may have! --* * Common sense is the collection of * ****** prejudices acquired by age eighteen. -- Albert Einstein ******** - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Aug 23 2000 - 21:00:08 EST