how to go forward?

[Holger Schurig]

All my little patches helped me to learn the source code
better. However, the big thing (actually separating
hardware independend and hardware dependend stuff)
hasn't been done.

The USB dongle I received currently behaves exactly
the same with the plain and with the following patches:

  no-file-in-debug.patch
  fix-debugfs.patch
  remove-unused-var.patch
  fix-printk-newline.patch
  remove-libertas-sbi-get-priv.patch
  remove-static-wlanpriv.patch
  make-mesh-configurable.patch

http://projects.linuxtogo.org/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/trunk/patches/?root=marvell8385



However, I'm nearing a state where my patches get more
intrusive and bigger. I'm not really sure on how to
proceed. Basically, I want to move things from main.c
into if_usb.c that are usb-related. That means
splitting wlan_add_card() into more function.

Currently I'm thinking on the line to have a basic
libertas_add_card() in main.c which get's a void* cardp.
It would alloc_etherdev(), kmalloc wlan_private *priv
(hmm, why not kzalloc?), and basically do all the things
that are not inside #ifdef CONFIG_LIBERTAS_MESH after my
patch "make-mesh-configurable.patch".

In if_usb_probe() we currently call wlan_add_card(). That
would be changed to libertas_add_card(). If that succeeded,
we'd would call a static if_usb_add_card() which would do
all the mesh_dev things.

It could even re-route some of the dev->XXXX function
pointers set in libertas_add_card() to local copies.
Example: main.c's libertas_add_card() would do

  dev->set_mac_address = libertas_set_mac_address

if_usb.c's if_usb_probe() would call if_usb_add_card(), which
in turn would override this:

  priv->wlan_dev.netdev->set_mac_address = if_usb_sef_mac_address

And in if_usb_mac_address() we'd do something like this:

  static int if_usb_set_mac_address(struct net_device *dev,
                                    void *addr)
  {
      wlan_private *priv = dev->priv;
      int ret = libertas(set_mac_address(dev, addr);
      if (ret==0) {
           memcpy(priv->mesh_dev->dev_addr, 
                 (struct sockaddr *) addr, ETH_ALEN);
      }
      return ret;
  }


Would that architecture be acceptable?