Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 3 Feb 2014 12:18:53 -0800 | Subject | Re: rtl8821ae. | From | Linus Torvalds <> |
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On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:12 PM, Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@oracle.com> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 03, 2014 at 11:05:42AM -0600, Larry Finger wrote: >> A combined driver would require very many branches based on chip >> number and would certainly execute much more slowly. > > I seriously doubt there are performance issues with merging the drivers.
Quite frankly, merging drivers can be a f*cking pain. I would seriously suggest avoiding it *unless* the hardware is literally almost identical, or the drivers have been written with multi-chip support from the ground up by people who actually understood the hardware.
But the reason isn't performance - it's subtle breakage. Merged drivers have a tendency to break support for chip A when you fix something for chip B. And the end result is a driver that nobody understands, and nobody can sanely test.
Sometimes it's simply better to leave old drivers alone.
Linus
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