Re: Bug#353277: ndiswrapper in main
On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 03:25:37PM +0100, Gabor Gombas wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 02:36:52PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
>
> > The CIPE driver doesn't actually need hardware, since it is an
> > encryption layer. As such, I can use it as a test-case for ndiswrapper,
> > to find out how the latter works and to actually be able to test whether
> > I set it up correctly. If a customer should at one point ask me to help
> > them out with setting up ndiswrapper, I can then first experiment on my
> > own with the CIPE driver, and then help them out with their non-free
> > driver.
>
> In this case I do not want to hire you as a consultant ever, thank you
> very much. You should know that Windows gives ~16k stack to network
> drivers, while current Linux+ndiswrapper only gives ~6k if you are
> lucky, and ~4k if/when the "4K stacks" option becomes the default. So
> even if your test case works it _does not_ give any indication that any
> other non-free driver will also work.
No, but it will allow me to find out how the bloody thing is _supposed_
to work, even without having direct access to the customer's hardware.
There is nothing to prevent me from experimenting a bit more at the
customer's site; but at least this can give me a headstart.
[...]
> > A kernel hacker might be interested in helping out to hack on
> > ndiswrapper itself, but not be very interested in having their laptop
> > crash every five minutes by loading experimental versions of the driver.
> > An obvious solution would be to use a virtualization environment like
> > qemu, but then you can't use a driver that requires specific hardware.
> > The fact that CIPE exists, which does not have any hardware
> > requirements, can allow you to test stuff without having an unstable
> > computing environment for other things.
>
> You are not serious that such a developer would be incapable to locate
> the ndiswrapper source if it was in contrib instead of main, are you?
The question was not whether I developer would be able to locate the
source if it were in contrib; the question was whether there is a real
use case of the NDIS version of the CIPE driver. I gave you one. Well,
three actually.
[...]
> > Now consider that there is a change in some future version of the
> > kernel, which is security-related, and which breaks the kernel API wrt
> > network drivers incompatibly.
>
> Unlikely, whoever breaks in-kernel API is responsible for fixing all
> in-kernel drivers as well.
CIPE is currently not an in-kernel driver.
--
Fun will now commence
-- Seven Of Nine, "Ashes to Ashes", stardate 53679.4
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