WANTED: someone who knows what exactly that ssb thingy is intended/used for

[Matthew Garrett]

On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 06:20:30PM +0200, Stefan Bader wrote:

> thank you for this explanation. Interestingly, from experiments, the wl driver 
> module works without the ssb module being loaded. My explanation is that the 
> ssb driver binds to all supported pci devices. So it either does handle this 
> internally or it does not need to explicitly address the ssb.

Each PCI broadcom device has its own PCI->SSB bridge. By default, the 
ssb driver will bind to all the ssb devices available. If wl is loaded 
first then wl will claim the b43 PCI->SSB bridge. ssb will no longer be 
able to bind to that PCI device, but if loaded later will succeed in 
binding to the b44 PCI->SSB bridge.

The optimal solution to this is to implement support for the LP and 
N-phys in the b43 driver. The alternative is to fiddle with load order - 
that'll involve working out some way to enforce entries appearing 
earlier in the module mapping files.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org