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From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>
To: Adrian Chadd <adrian@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: [rfc] removing the NDISulator
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 14:27:16 -0400
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 (bigwig.baldwin.cx); Wed, 23 Oct 2013 14:40:56 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: "Julian H. Stacey" <jhs@berklix.com>, Alfred Perlstein <bright@mu.org>,
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On Wednesday, October 23, 2013 2:11:29 pm Adrian Chadd wrote:
> On 23 October 2013 11:09, Alfred Perlstein <bright@mu.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> > Eh, having taken a stab at porting the bwl blob already, I would strongly
> >> oppose removing NDIS.  If you do that I will just stop using my netbook
> >> with a Broadcom part altogether as I wouldn't be able to use it to try to
> >> test bwl changes.  The NDIS thing is a bit hackish, but it is quite 
useful
> >> for a lot of folks.
> >>
> >>  I have to agree.  Deprecation != motivation.
> 
> 
> I can pull out examples of this not holding true:
> 
> * all the giant locking in drivers
> * all the giant locking in VFS
> 
> People did pop up and claim ownership of things they cared about. Some
> stuff died, some stuff didn't. There was enough of a motivation by us to
> kill giant off in these pathways so things could continue to evolve. We
> didn't leave the GIANT crutch in forever.

Giant isn't dead yet. :)  (And I've done a lot of the de-Gianting FWIW.)

I don't consider ndis in the same camp.  Often times there are vendors where
datasheets, etc. are not obtainable, but a foo.sys + foo.inf is.

-- 
John Baldwin