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The Linux Incompatibility List
Jonathan Lassoff writes "The Linux Incompatibility list is a wiki project that attempts to document hardware that is incompatible with Linux rather than list what is compatible. In the wiki, it is possible to add alternitives so as to push hardware manufacturers to make good binary drivers, publish specifications, or even better, publish open drivers."
Ok. This incompatability list is gonna be useless...why?
Hmm...I wonder if my DWL650+ is incompatable. Well...I don't see it in the list.
I wonder if it's because it's compatable, or no one has assessed it yet!
Jee...I guess I'll STILL need to search a million websites, etc. etc.
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
This was in order to force hardware manufacturers to release the source code.
Not at all. This is to prevent people from running old modules against a new kernel version, where symbol names and other internals may have changed, thus resulting in potential crashses, instabilities, etc. As I understand it, you can turn this off by disabling kernel module versioning, but the module itself may refuse to load if it detects the wrong kernel version.
Fortunately, there's a really easy way around this that nVidia and other folks use. nVidia distributes their drivers as a binary driver, along with some source which acts as a thin layer between the binary code and the kernel itself. This layer is then compiled for the specific kernel version, while the binary driver portion remains the same. This is, incidentally, how I install the driver (since they have no modules for my specific kernel version).
Most hardware is useless in a few years anyway,
Holy crap, HIBT? This is the dumbest thing I've read in a *long* time. Hardware is *far* from useless, even long after it's been "obsoleted". It's only the silly gamerz that require the latest and greatest... most people get by with fairly modest equipment. Heck, my firewall ran on a 486 DX/100... that is, until the power supply died. *sigh*
I'm probably going to end up with a troll mod but...
I think the first thing should be ACPI. ACPI support plain sucks under linux. I would pay the same amount for a linux distro as I do for MS XP pro ($200+/-) if that distro supported ACPI just as well as the MS operating systems.
What could possibly go wrong?
One of the reasons the Linux kernel has improved so much, is so stable, and can scale as well as it can, is that when there is a technical reason to dictate a change, the changes is made. They don't have to support bad decisions made years and years ago (actually they do if it affects userspace applications, but if it's internal to the kernel, it gets killed with impunity). To pick a particular example from Windows, the GDI memory goop that Win95, Win3.x and Win98 had. When you ran out of that, your machine was cooked. It didn't matter how much RAM you had, that amount of that was relatively fixed. It was a stupid problem, that caused me no end of pain, but there it was. I'm sure Solaris has one. Well, heck, I hear the TLI/STREAMs interface is vile, but it was one of the two standard driver models that was easy to write. However, it had very poor performance.
The other thing that's nice about Open Source only drivers, is that there's one and only one implementation of a lot of stuff. Tons of network cards have essentially the same structure for a lot of the driver. All that gets refactored out into common modules for all drivers to use. If a bug is found in that shared code, it's fixed in all of them at once.
Linus doesn't support Binary interfaces, because he has to choose between making it easy for you to have a non-open driver, or for making it easy for him to make the Linux kernel be as good as it can be. I'm all for making Linux as good as Linux can be. You might want him to choose "support a driver model for the lifetime of a kernel series", but I just buy hardware that is known working with Linux. Yeah it sucks at times that I can't get a specific piece of hardware that sounds cool, but I get Linux for free. I'll take that trade 8 days a week.
Kirby