[Asterisk-Users] Intel 537EP chipset, revisited

[Steven Critchfield]

On Fri, 2004-06-11 at 06:05, Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:
> On Friday 11 June 2004 01:07, Lee Howard wrote:
> > And furthermore, Intel uses the same driver for all of the 537
> > chipsets, so I would think that the FA82537EP chip would be compatible
> > with the MD3200 chip.
> 
> First of all -- very good email.  You did your research, you tried some 
> things, you scratched your head, tried some more...  Bravo!  These are the 
> kinds of emails that should be nominated for "How to Ask a Good Question" of 
> the year posts, and I'm not kidding.

I'll agree 100% with this comment. It was put together well enough to
hold off a flame for bothering the list with question.

> The part of your message I quoted is important.  Universal drivers don't mean 
> the chipsets they 'drive' are compatible.  Intel could have just put drivers 
> for two different chipsets into one driver and left it at that.  Sure, it 
> makes the driver bigger but the support implications are much nicer.  "Grab 
> the latest driver" instead of "Grab the driver for the Intel EP... no E as in 
> Enchantingly... yes, and then P as in Phrustrated... no, P, not F... can't 
> you spell?" -- you get the idea.  :-)

A reason for the modems to share the same driver is because most of the
heavy lifting(dsp) code is the same no matter what winmodem is
underneath it. The only thing that might be different is the results
returned ans access methods for the audio and or state information. All
that is relatively minor compared to implementing a modems dsp code.

You next step really would to be to go looking through the module load
function and maybe through some debugging code in there to have it tell
you more about what is going on. Luckily enough, if you didn't crash the
machine with your module, you can probably load and unload safely until
you break something in the module. This is one of those nice things
about linux drivers from a developer stand point.

-- 
Steven Critchfield  <critch at basesys.com>