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Simplifying Linux Driver Installation
prostoalex writes "O'Reilly Network posts an update on Project Utopia that produced Hardware Abstraction Layer for Linux simplifying device changes. They also link to the Driver on Demand project on SourceForge, whose goal is to create a central database to enable Linux desktops download the drivers automatically when the user plugs in her new hardware device."
Also when will the major heads of the different distros define a single good, method of packaging programs.
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Simply the truth. Go into any chat or mail list and ask when something is gonna work or be fixed and most of the time they tell ya when you send the patches
For what it's worth, I'm somewhat sympathetic to Linus. Look at what HAL did for/to Windows. Crappy driver/HAL implementations were responsible for a lot of Windows perceived and real stability problems. Now Microsoft likes to certify drivers (WHQL), so they only take the blame for their own damn bugs.
Basically, it's a double-edged sword. Convenience vs. Stability. Personally, I think if Linus is serious about the desktop there needs to be some compomise. Me, I just dumped Linux on the desktop for my sweet new OS X system. Viva la UNIX!
It is obvious that I as an corporate user, would refuse to install *anything* on my Linux system that has not gone through my distributor. After all, that's why I pay them. And pushing third-party binary modules in my running kernel would be a very quick way of nullifying their support agreements.
For the home user, things might well be different. But most people are running a distribution anyway, and would probably feel more comfortable getting drivers from them. That's how they get the security updates, so both the trust and the technical procedure is already in place. So if the distributors are to share the workload of getting these drivers, then a open project may be the right way -- but only for distributing the module source. Not many users would get drivers from here (Gentoo users come to mind).
The article has an ivory-tower stance to it and I think they solve the wrong problem. First we need to establish what the problem actually is. If the drivers are few and small then all drivers could be included in a typical distribution and updated with the rest of the system. Perhaps all that is needed is for distribution to update their kernel packages more often?
In the article the ABI was mentioned as the interface of the drivers to the kernel. Maybe it could be possible to create a higher level driver API on top of that? This API could then be ported to newer linux versions?
Dunno, but as a computer developer I'm having serious trouble setting up my computer for linux. I've seen a few full crashes already, which are probably due to flaky drivers. Not all my devices have been picked up automatically either. Currently my HP deskjet printer is not working, even though it should be supported by the kernel, and is USB, so it should be plug and play.
The way v4l and scanners are working on linux are great examples, I would like to see higher levels and even user space processes dedicated for this kind of hardware. Let the disk IO, memory etc. be left to the kernel, but try to lift all non-critical drivers to a higher level. A common API for that would look to me as a great idea.
For Linux on the desktop, this is probably going to be a deciding factor. Ov of the greatest features of windows is the ability to plug anything into the system, and have it just work, and thats what I would love to have in Linx. Also if the OSS community focuses on a single method of releasing the drivers, I would assume that this would make Hardware companies, be more apt to releasing their drivers to this system.
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But when Windows DOESN'T have the driver, good luck. Windows has (and has had for quite a while) the ability to search for the driver on the internet (it's a choice in the add hardware/change driver dialog), but I've NEVER seen it actually find a driver off the internet. I think it would be FANTASTIC if a user could buy hardware, stick it in the machine, and have that happen. If the kernel has the driver, it works. If it doesn't, it finds it on the internet and gives you the option to download and install it. No web searches, no checking obscure folders on driver CDs, nothing weird. Just plug it in and in a few seconds you're ready to go. That would be awesome.
Linux could have it, cool. Windows "has" it but I've never seen it work (has anyone else? Maybe it's just the hardware I use, maybe if I used server hardware like SCSI cards that would be in there). With Macs many things "Just work", but can OS X do anything like this?
A little thing like this will go a long way to make Linux seem more grown up and appealing to the average user (the concept of drivers confuses most computer newbies I help, so automating it would be a big help).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
My wife installs all the new hardware on both our computers. This started when I got her a few gigs of memory, large HDs, better video card, etc. for birthdays, Xmas,etc. Rather than wait for me to have time to install the gadgetry, she RTFMed and took off the side panel and went to work.
I never have any trouble finding a present for her. BeastlyBuy, CircusCity, and CompUGH are all on the way home from work and allow last minute shopping.
I in turn have the simple pleasure of working six and seven days a week at a nontechnical job. The General Manager once asked me about a problem with a monitor. I went to the tool cart, returned with a 10lb. sledgehammer, and asked where it was. I have never been asked a computer question since.
How does a Computer know that when I plug in a USB mouse that the computer knows it is a mouse, and what drivers to use with it?
It would be interesting to incorporate the drivers onto the pice of hardware. I mean what if insead of including a CD [that these days are filled with crap] with the hardware, that they just put a small flash memory onto the item, and stored the drivers there. Then as new drivers were avalable, the OS would update the flash mem with new drivers as they were avalable. This may raise the cost of the item, but I would rather have a item that I can use anywhere on any machine without having to search for drivers, or cary a cd around with me.
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Question for the Kernel coders, what perctage of drivers are reverse engineered?? 60-70%
The percentage would be near 0% if not 0%. Plenty of hardware manufacturers have released open or open-enough programming specifications for their hardware. Intel, AMD and National Semiconductor are a few examples.
For example, here are the programming specifications for my network card, a Netgear FA312 - DP83815 10 100 Mb s Integrated PCI Ethernet Media Access Controller and Physical Layer (MacPhyter)
Companies like NVidia and ATi are the exception, not the rule.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Hardware Abstraction Layers are VERY old. Even the 6502 based Commodore computer series (PET, VC20, C64 et. al.) had some kind of HAL, it was called the Kernel ROM, and developers were strongly encouraged to use the I/O-Routines provided by the Kernel ROM instead of writing their own.
The whole point of the VM/CMS operation system from IBM was hardware abstraction. That's where the name comes from: Virtual Machine CMS. VM/CMS was providing an abstract CMS system (CMS being the predecessor of VM/CMS) for each process or task, so you could use multiple virtual CMS systems on your hardware.
Just because WinNT uses hardware abstraction doesn't make it an innovative idea from Microsoft.
Same about KDevelop. Ever used an OSF Motif Toolkit? They are around since the early days of Motif (around 1988), and the Visual series from Microsoft could easily be called an ripoff. Not to forget the Turbo Pascal/Borland Pascal/Delphi IDEs or again IBM with the VisualAge series of compilers.
The real power of Microsoft is not innovation, it is the sheer manpower and organisation they have to integrate ideas that proved to work into a single, quite coherent system (even though in the beginning, Microsoft's offerings didn't integrate very well into each other... The first MS Office suites for instance had different file dialogs in every program, and different ways to set up the printer... but it got better every version).
And for becoming "more and more similar to Windows": If the default installation is in a substantial way different than Windows, the whining goes: "Steep learning curve! It's too different!". If the differences are hidden, then the whining is: "It's becoming more and more Windows! Where is the innovation?" It seems as if the GUI developers have to choose between Scylla and Charybdis here.
I'm actually quite satisfied with the way linux handles devices and their drivers right now (this is stuff for nerds after all).
But I always wonder why there isn't a huge effort to build an abstract abstraction layer... it could look like this:
Every piece of hardware is equipped with a standardized storage chip, which contains detailed information about the purpose of the device and instructions on how to "talk" to it. Basically I'm looking for a way to enable any OS to figure out a driver on its own.
I know that many vendors (like nvidia) would never support such an idea, since they prefer to keep the source of their drivers secret. And I also doubt that it would be easy to write something like this for modern video cards. But something like this would be great for input devices or nics.
I don't read replies by ACs.
There's no reason really. I've totally switched to Linux...it's the only OS on my machine. I don't do any dual booting.
Games I play, have them already on Linux. Though wouldn't mind trying out Half Life 2...
Everything else I agree with other than configuring...it's easy. At least it was for me.
Things I miss? So far, nothing. It does everything I ever did on my Windows XP machine...but more. Since I switched I feel I certainly know my machine better. I know the processes it's running at any given time. And of course it feels quicker than XP ever did...but I guess everyone's impression of this will be different.
But the reason I switched was basically financial. I saved around 80 bucks by not installing Windows...and then I saved of course by using only open source programs. 80 bucks may not seem like a lot, but it's 80 bucks. And perhaps I was thinking it was only a stop gap solution, and if I really hated Linux I could always break down and buy Windows and put it on there...but this has been over a year now.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
But disk activity kills the machine. It's a laptop, so disk access is a little slow, but if I work with large files (open, close, save, copy, etc) especiallyi zip/rar files (lots of file operations) the system begins to slow to a crawl. Now I understand that the disk activity can slow the computer, but after all the transfers are complete, the computer is still slow. Opening IE goes from near instant (before all that) to seconds of the computer chugging. After that if I close IE and open it again, it still has to chug to open it (so it's not some simple cache thing). The computer is just slow as heck to respond to anything untill I reboot it. At that point it's fine! The same happens after defragging my disk if it's bad (and requires lots of operations to fix it).
I swear, it's like there is some internal limit in Windows when after a certain number of file operations, the system purposly slows down. Frankly I wouldn't be suprised if a little box popped up saying "You are doing too much heavy disk activity. Please buy Windows Server .Net 2003 for better performance" or something.
Never happens with Linux on the same machine, so it has to be something Windows is doing. Windows has gotten much MUCH better from the 3.1/95 days, but it still has some problems.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
FYI, here's the American Heritige Dictionary's informative usage note on the word "they":
Usage Note: The use of the third-person plural pronoun they to refer to a singular noun or pronoun is attested as early as 1300, and many admired writers have used they, them, themselves, and their to refer to singular nouns such as one, a person, an individual, and each. W.M. Thackeray, for example, wrote in Vanity Fair in 1848, "A person can't help their birth," and more recent writers such as George Bernard Shaw and Anne Morrow Lindbergh have also used this construction, in sentences such as "To do a person in means to kill them," and "When you love someone you do not love them all the time." The practice is widespread and can be found in such mainstream publications as the Christian Science Monitor, Discover, and the Washington Post. The usage is so common in speech that it generally passes unnoticed. However, despite the convenience of third-person plural forms as substitutes for generic he and for structurally awkward coordinate forms like his/her, many people avoid using they to refer to a singular antecedent out of respect for the traditional grammatical rule concerning pronoun agreement. Most of the Usage Panelists reject the use of they with singular antecedents. Eighty-two percent find the sentence The typical student in the program takes about six years to complete their course work unacceptable. Thus, the writer who chooses to use they in similar contexts in writing should do so only if assured that the usage will be read as a conscious choice rather than an error. Interestingly, Panel members do seem to distinguish between singular nouns, such as the typical student, and pronouns that are grammatically singular but semantically plural, such as anyone and everyone. Sixty-four percent of panel members accept the sentence No one is willing to work for those wages anymore, are they? in informal speech. See Usage Note at any. See Usage Note at anyone. See Usage Note at he1. See Usage Note at she.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
I think this would be great.
Once I had the experience of trying to install Linux on my Dad's machine, and Linux was up and running, and all that was left is to get the computer online using the USB wireless dongle.
But when I googled around looking for drivers, apparently that dongle has 3 revisions, each with totally different drivers. Still, I wasn't discouraged and try then all in turn!
But somehow it doesn't work!
Then I found a thread in a forum somewhere which says I have to look at the stuff that is displayed during bootup, copy down something, and type a command. I did that, still doesn't work.
Then I did the same for each of the other 2 drivers in turn, ditto.
End up, defeated, I reinstalled Windoze on that machine. That so sucks man. Cos months later I got a phone call from my folks asking me how to get rid of those pr0n popups and stuff.
If only those drivers worked back then.
Currently it is really quite a challenge getting some bits of hardware to work right on linux. In fact, it is not currently, it has always been an issue. Once this is improved, I don't see why Linux won't fly.
2005 is the year of Linux on the desktop (and if John Titor is right, the end of US of A as we know it)
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
Hehe - but the HAL 9000 in 2001 was an acronym for Heuristic Algorithmic Logic (in case anyone's interested) and used holographic data storage.
;) hehe.
"Obviously this project was created by people hoping to expedite the construction of an intelligent machine capable of going awry and killing humans. You sick bastards."
Actually to make it more accurate to the book series and also to Windows, you could probably consider HAL the technology that Micro$oft used to make Winblows (mainly from Xerox, Apple, etc). In the 2001 book, HAL suffers from the effects of human lies and deception, which he was supposed to follow and also perform himself. The issue was the existence of TMA-2 by Jupiter (the large monolith) and he was supposed to lie to the crew about the entire issue, which he couldn't accurately do (thus the hysteria). You could tie that into Micro$soft's deliberate lies, manipulation, deception, etc, and show that the software and hardware is going berzerk today because of it
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
Easy solution:
fork();
Why?
As much as I like and respect Linus and his decisions, it seems the kernel has become an "entity" of sorts. Times are changing and certain problems will arise when one uses time-honored policies instead of progressive thinking (not to say Linus is not a progressive thinker, on the contrary...)
A fork, based on a recent stable release, that is kept current by applying patches and fixes while preserving the existing driver ABI. Redhat does this when it back-ports features from newer kernels into its production kernels. Basically, let Linus and co. write the bleeding-edge kernels while said fork makes catastrophic changes to the driver ABI every two years or so instead of every three weeks.
I may be wrong in my thinking, but a fork wouldn't hurt anything in my opinion. This wouldn't be a fork due to policy decisions e.g. FreeBSD + OpenBSD or XFree86 + Xorg, but a fork of necessity to provide hardware manufacturers a stable interface for supporting linux, therefore allowing them to focus more on improving their drivers' performance than on keeping up with each kernel release. Then, they can release binary drivers and rest assured that they will work for some period of time.
Just my $0.02
What is needed is telling me what applications I could use with the devices. Many Linux applications use libusb and don't need a driver (in fact you can't use libusb against an interface that a driver has claimed).
So if I plug in a cell phone, I should be told about BitPim for CDMA phones, and whatever is used for GSM phones. Whatever the scanner app is should appear for scanners. Epson printers should cause me to be told about mtink etc.
And all this can be done outside the kernel.
I suggest you look up "Context Switching", then get back with me what a good idea user space drivers would be.
GDI used to be in user space (WIndows if you are oblivious), but it was moved to kernel space because thats where that stuff belongs.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
So? You're asking people who are doing things *in their spare time* to give you a deadline for fixing something that may be needed by exactly one person (you).
The "volunteer" excuse. If you think because they're volunteers that that justifies treating users like peons, then don't complain when users whine that Linux is only for developers, by developers. Don't complain when people mention that Linux desktop acceptance is stagnant.
If you want help feel free ask what the current state of the driver is, but don't expect anyone to do anything about it unless you're prepared to help, or give them money.
Consequently, don't expect very many users to stay interested since they could just easily run to the store and buy (or warez) Windows and have the same feature after a quick 30 minute install that some holier-than-thou developer expects your patches or your money for. Not exactly a "free" operating system in that kind of model, is it?
btw. MS are exactly the same. Try asking them when 'feature x' will work. They'll want money before you'll get a sensible answer about it (in that case you don't even have the option of doing it yourself).
BS. Microsoft won't ask for money just because you ask them when a certain feature will work. They'll take your response into their Customer Feedback program, correlate it with their database of entries. Guess what, if a lot of people are requesting something, it gets put in for the next version. THEN they ask for money. They have a financial incentive to please their customers, hence they have the features users want.
Don't claim Linux is free and then tell me that for it to be usable, you have to put your life on halt and learn to program, or start mailing people money.
Hell, I had trouble with a Lexar JumpDrive (a USB solid-state storage device) today on Windows XP. Had the thing in my pocket, at my parents' house, and they wanted me to touch up a photo but seemed reluctant for me to take the original. OK, no problem. So I sat down at their computer, fired up their image-editing software, and set the scanner to scan at 1200dpi, grayscale. Then:
/dev/sda1. /etc/fstab.
1. I plugged in the Lexar JumpDrive.
2. I went to My Computer, and was delighted to learn that the JumpDrive hadn't been detected.
3. Unplugged the Lexar JumpDrive.
4. Went into the Control Panel and Device Profiles, only to find that some sort of obscure-sounding USB device was misconfigured. Since they have a largely from-the-factory-setup Dell, I thought that had to be my hardware. Let Windows search for the drivers; it failed.
5. Plugged in the Lexar JumpDrive.
6. Unplugged the Lexar JumpDrive.
7. Plugged in the Lexar JumpDrive.
8. Restarted the XP machine, because my parents said they'd had the machine "acting squirly for a while."
9. Waited for restart, opened My Computer.
10. Unplugged the Lexar JumpDrive.
11. Went to the Lexar website looking for 3rd-party drivers. None available or needed.
12. Plugged in the Lexar JumpDrive.
13. Went to the Dell website. Waited for an eternity for the site to load.
14. Unplugged the Lexar JumpDrive to get a specific model number, and typed it into a Search box.
15. Plugged in the Lexar JumpDrive.
16. Raise an eyebrow since the device was autodetected and properly configured without human intervention.
Contrast this with my experience with a relatively user-unfriendly Linux install:
1. Plug in the Lexar JumpDrive.
2. Do some command-line magick to find that it's set up as
3. Edit
4. Set up a KDE device icon.
5. Click on the icon. Note: from now on, clicking on the icon mounts the device and opens a Konqueror window, while right-clicking gives me an unmount option.
Or, on Mac OS X:
1. Plug in the Lexar JumpDrive.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
The real problem isn't the kernels and the device support therein, rather, its the devices. Really, how many different ways do you need to send data to a printer, or a disk, or get images off a digital camera or webcam, or sound to and from a soundcard, or a 3d command pipeline to a vid card ? The plethora of different device interfaces for substantially identical devices is the real problem.
Instead, I think there should be a (small set of) _device_ standards.
That is, something like a architecture standard: a standard category of devices which the manufacturers will agree to provide standard interfaces for
Combine that with a standard, architecture independent way of allowing devices to carry their own drivers. Perhaps something like a fast Forth like bytecode interpreter.
Maybe not the best approach, but a lot better than what we have now.
-- Pat
The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred
FYI: Debian stable was released in July of 2002, over 2 years ago. Get your hands on a copy of Suse 9.x and give it a shot. You'll have a better idea of how far and fast we've come in 2 years.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
Do you get that little pop up about "not enough virtual memory, increasing swap file size" or something to that effect? Once you're past the minimum virtual memory size, Windows does something to increase the swap file size.
I haven't properly tested or researched this, so YMMV, but several times now, that process has slowed my PC to a crawl - during AND after the increase.
Though, that shouldn't have anything to do with a disk defrag...
You could, for example, have a graphics library that was setuid root, to allow non-root users to access the graphics hardware through a rectricted API.
This gives you the advantages of a shared library (no context switching, driver is distributed and managed separately from the kernel) without the disadvantages (processes must run as root because the library requires root privileges to access the hardware). There's only one disadvantage that I can think of: all arguments must be passed on the stack because the caller and the protected library have different data segments. If the protected library can be given access to the caller's data segment as well as its own, that problem disappears - the 386 supports six segments so that should be possible in principle. But passing arguments on the stack might be a better solution because it would allow arbitrary nesting of protected libraries.
I have installed Linux several times over the last few years, on practically all of my hardware configurations.
But none of the times has it been plug'n play. Often drivers that worked in one version didn't work on the next. So after the having a system where the graphics worked, It wouldn't on the next, because that driver had been left out. But now the sound would work. And so on.
I don't remember ever having a painless installation. Untill I do, I won't bother with Linux as my workstation. It will keep running on a simple server with old and safe hardware where the drivers will allways work.
Windows is more than stable enough for my desktop, and I can easily earn the price of XP Pro in the time I save not fiddling with drivers.
The quality of the desktop really isn't the main problem for my Linux usage. I don't find it worse, just different. But using too much time installing the OS is a problem.
I don't do it as a hobby. The OS is a tool, and so has to be efficient.
Max M - IT's Mad Science
First thing I did when I saw this article was shudder. Why? The majority of problems I've ever had with XP have been with the shoddy implementation of a Hardware Abstraction Layer, and the associated problems that an 'all your eggs in one basket' approach can bring you. You can see for yourself: Just Google for 'Missing Hal.DLL' and you'll see just how easy it is for this file to be corrupted / disappear etc etc.
I don't think the above post deserved to be flamebait - he made a valid point, just somewhat uneloquently.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.