Fwd: heads-up: breaking up ath (back) into sub-devices

[Adrian Chadd]

Forwarded here in case -arch wants to comment.



Adrian

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Adrian Chadd <adrian.chadd at gmail.com>
Date: 28 March 2011 15:48
Subject: heads-up: breaking up ath (back) into sub-devices
To: freebsd-current <freebsd-current at freebsd.org>


Hi all,

I'd like to split the ath driver back up into some of its sub-components in
-HEAD before 9.0-RELEASE is done.

Those components are:

* ath (the BSD/net80211 facing interface itself)
* ath_hal (hardware layer)
* ath_rate_* (the rate control modules)
* ath_pci (the ath<->PCI glue)

Since I'm planning on supporting embedded devices as well as PCI/PCIe
devices, I'm going to split out ath_pci from ath. I'll then introduce an
ath_ahb device for embedded atheros radios hanging off the AHB bus.

I'd also like to split out the HAL and rate control modules too in
preparation for some later work. Since there's likely going to be some
alternative rate control modules when 11n pops up, I'd like to make it easy
for people to test the various ones out without having to continually
recompile the whole ath driver itself. It also makes doing some current and
legacy embedded systems development quite a bit easier.

This will change kernel config files in -HEAD and thus 9.0-RELEASE.

Please let me know if you have any issues with this.

Thanks,


Adrian