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Qualcomm Calls To 'Kill All Proprietary Drivers For Good'

Posted by timothy on from the you-and-what-army dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Next week at the sixth Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, two Qualcomm Atheros engineers will be making a stand for killing all proprietary drivers for good — across all operating systems. The Qualcomm slides go over their early plans. Do they stand a chance?"

9 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. chance or no... by X0563511 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I know where I'm throwing my money the next time I need such hardware!

    --
    For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    1. Re:chance or no... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 5, Funny

      I know where I'm throwing my money the next time I need such hardware!

      In the opposite direction?

      According to Newton, that's exactly the right direction!

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    2. Re:chance or no... by adri · · Score: 5, Informative

      Really? I have almost all of their PCI/PCIe 802.11n hardware working, stable and supporting 802.11na/802.11ng. I fixed AR9280 support, fixed AR9285 support and added AR9287 support. Once 802.11n support is in the tree I'll move to tidying up the DMA and interrupt path and introduce the changes needed for AR93xx and later series NICs. I have working bluetooth coexistence patches that I haven't yet setup a test bed to validate and I have things stable now on both SMP and UP machines.

      The only thing I've broken is TDMA.

      A lot of those commits are because I've been (a) fixing issues as they've come up, and (b) I like doing small commits that make it easier to bisect changes.

      I think I've done a pretty good job. I'm glad to take constructive criticism. The PR system is ----> That way. :)

  2. A possible prerequisite... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Killing software patents.

  3. Start with their GSM/CDMA/LTE basebands. by bytestorm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If Qualcomm starts with their cellphone baseband processors, I'll start listening.

    1. Re:Start with their GSM/CDMA/LTE basebands. by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yeah, where's the damn Snapdragon datasheet?

      And what's with the piles of binary blobs in handsets based on their hardware?

      Oh, and the dual-licensing of the AR6000 WLAN driver that lets vendors like Samsung effectively release it as a proprietary module?

      --
      retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
  4. Re:Fagets by Score+Whore · · Score: 5, Funny

    Fagets, is that French?

    Yes. It's a kind of bread you can smoke.

  5. Re:Quick Answer by Chatsubo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    An example that leaves a particular bad taste in my mouth...

    I bought a set of LCD shutter-glasses years ago. I had an nVidia card that had driver support for them. I got these babies, got the special nVidia driver, and I was blown away.

    But soon I needed to upgrade my gfx card, and found nVidia no longer supported shutter-glass stereo on any of their new shiny cards. Weird right? All you need is software trickery.... but wait, yes.... Suddenly 3D LCD panels come out and nVidia simultaneously releases drivers that support them. And next thing you know, they have their own shutter glasses that cost way, way more than the ones I'd bought years before.

    And still, there's no support for my set. Support that already existed.

    My opinion: This is why hardware companies care about drivers, it lets them wrangle money out of people who'd like support for their products.

    --
    > no, yes, maybe (tagging beta)
  6. Project UDI? by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Many years ago i was associated with Project UDI, the Uniform Driver Interface. The goal was to make a uniform ABI/API for device drivers. On Machines with the same hardware target (say, 32 bit x86) you would have binary compatibility. The same driver works on Solaris or Windows. For other platforms, they'd be at least source compatible. It worked in theory, and somewhat in practice - I think UnixWare shipped this as their native Device Driver Interface.

    But you never heard of it. Part of it was the SCO/Caldera fiasco. 'Nuff said about that.

    But part of it also was the fact that people had vested interests in this failing. Most famously, Stallman didn't like it. For now you could ship drivers without source for all i386 targets (not that having the normal Linux DDI prevented that before). But it was fun that I worked on something shipped in a commercial kernel, and also something that pissed off Stallman.

    More importantly, the people who want this are necessarily in the weakest position. MS doesn't want this - everyone makes Windows drivers. They get nothing from it except lower exclusivity. (The fact that Gates and Stallman were on the same side of this should have given Stallman time to reflect). They'd never allow the UDI code to touch their kernel. One or two other big UNIX vendors feigned interest, but they had the same issue - they had exclusive (to UNIX) device drivers, and they'd lose exclusivity. Only Caldera used it. It was their project, and it helped their forked codebase - they had both UnixWare and OpenServer (very old) code bases they needed drivers for, and it made it an easier target for device makers.

    None of the issues were tech issues, they all were people issues, which haven't gone away in the intervening years.