Future of the axe driver?

[Andrew Thompson]

On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 01:22:38AM -0800, Luke Dean wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sat, 28 Feb 2009, Andrew Thompson wrote:
> 
>> On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 07:40:02PM -0800, Luke Dean wrote:
>>> Has axe been phased out?  Will there be another driver to support my
>>> device when I decide to move to FreeBSD 8?  Is there anything I can do to
>>> help preserve support for this device?
>> 
>> Im not sure what posts were saying it was going to be phased out but it
>> isnt true and the hardware is very much supported. The driver now lives
>> under a slighty different location of sys/dev/usb/net/if_axe.c
>> 
> 
> There were a series of posts by Robert Watson titled
> "HEADS UP: IFF_NEEDSGIANT consumers to be disabled, removed"
> The latest one I received was on Feb 16 to current at freebsd.org.
> 
> There's a very good chance that I'm not understanding what I'm reading,
> but I interpreted it to mean that all network drivers that required GIANT
> locking (axe among them) would be disabled in CURRENT starting March 1,
> and removed entirely on April 1.
> 
> Thank you for confirming that I misunderstood this.

I can see how you could come to this conclusion :)

The new driver under sys/dev/usb/net/if_axe.c is no longer a consumer of
IFF_NEEDSGIANT (as with the test of the usb stack) so its off the
chopping block.


Andrew