Re: [libimobiledevice-devel] ipheth

["L. Alberto Giménez" <agimenez@sysvalve.es>]

On 04/02/2010 10:09 PM, Paul McEnery wrote:
[...]
> Without wanting to say anything on
> Bradley's behalf, it appeared as if he was in support of the tethering
> driver being implemented in kernel space. That said, and given the
> maturity of ipheth, would it be fair to say that ipheth is the way
> forward in terms of i<device> tethering?

Hi Paul,

Reading the thread that you posted, it seems like the original author
agreed to "kind of" support a kernel-space driver.

And about your question, I *personally* think that it's the way forward.
We have a hardware device that does networking. Si it needs a driver.
And I'm not the best friend of userspace drivers, except for very
specific tasks and to play a little bit (look ma! I implemented a
filesystem with FUSE!).


> Where do the udev rules and pairing utility reside?
> 
> I see two options here:
> 
> 1. Keep the ipheth-utils package and drop ipheth-dkms when ipheth
> makes it into the mainline kernel. Given that mainline inclusion could
> take a while, users (of Debian at least) could start to benefit almost
> immediately since all of the packaging work has already been done.

I think that this is the one that would fit my view (which may not be
the correct one, but it's my view). Then we can handle everything else
with package dependencies (usbmuxd, libimobiledevice, ...).

There are still some issues that are pending to fix over the first
driver submission. I've already posted a couple of messages regarding
those issues (I don't have the knowledge to decide about the low-level
aspects of the device or the kernel API itself) and contacted with
Daniel and Diego, so Í think that it's close to get in (linux-next, I
guess) if the list members don't have further comments.

If you need help packaging (I think that you are the "future" maintainer
for those Debian packages, am I right?), I have some basic experience
with it, so don't feel alone, I can help if required :)

Best regards,
-- 
L. Alberto Giménez
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