Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:15:16 +0100 From: Henrik Gulbrandsen <henrik@gulbra.net> To: "M. Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com>, Mikhail Teterin <mi+kde@aldan.algebra.com> Cc: stable@freebsd.org, freebsd-usb@freebsd.org Subject: Re: usb/umass, devfs: this sucks Message-ID: <1198689316.1119.382.camel@Particle> In-Reply-To: <20071226.003547.-932932005.imp@bsdimp.com> References: <200712212341.44308@aldan> <200712221313.lBMDDx5M036478@lava.sentex.ca> <200712260038.11546@aldan> <20071226.003547.-932932005.imp@bsdimp.com>
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On Wed, 2007-12-26 at 00:35 -0700, M. Warner Losh wrote: > In message: <200712260038.11546@aldan> > Mikhail Teterin <mi+kde@aldan.algebra.com> writes: > : If we want people to give FreeBSD a try in good faith, it is both profoundly > : stupid and dishonest on our part to claim, we have a working USB-system... It > : does not matter, how great our buffer-sharing VM is, if a home user can't > : process their photos with a FreeBSD-powered computer. > > In an ideal world, it would be perfect. > > However, all the USB hardware I've recently purchased actually does > work without a hitch on my FreeBSD system. Older card readers are > more problematic. > > Rather than complain about the system, how about merging RELENG_7's > usb stack to RELENG_6? Or fixing a few bugs from the PRs that are > filed? I did my time in a big push for 7.0, maybe some other people > can help out a little too? Fixing and merging are good, but it seems to me (as an occasional patch contributor without commit privileges) that the bottleneck for USB is still in the handling of incoming patches. At the moment, there are 162 USB PRs to close. Out of these, 103 are marked with "[patch]", but only 42 of those are actually in "patched" state. Almost all of the latter were apparently handled as part of Warner's summer push. The USB stack has to deal with many third-party devices, most of which will not be immediately available for testing by FreeBSD developers. This means that we are more or less forced to rely on external patch contributors (such as myself) to provide workarounds for the problems caused by various hardware peculiarities. Usually, it shouldn't take more than a basic code review to accept these patches, so this would be a good place to start if you want to improve USB handling in FreeBSD. Look at it from my perspective: I would be happy to complete my fix for the infamous five-year-old usb/46176, so people can finally detach umass devices without having to manually unmount them first. However, it will undoubtedly take a non-trivial amount of time to reproduce and eliminate the remaining issues. I'm more likely to put in that effort if I believe that my patches may actually end up in CURRENT, but if a one-line fix such as that in usb/78984 has not been applied after more than a year, how long will it take for patches that involve multiple subsystems? /Henrik
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