Free Linux Driver Development!
Greg KH
Yes, that's right, the Linux kernel community is offering all companies
free Linux driver development. No longer do you have to suffer through
all of the different examples in the Linux Device Driver Kit, or pick
through the thousands of example drivers in the Linux kernel source
tree trying to determine which one is the closest to what you need to
do.
All that is needed is some kind of specification that describes how your
device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing to
answer questions every once in a while. A few sample devices might be
good to have so that debugging doesn't have to be done by email, but if
necessary, that can be done.
In return, you will receive a complete and working Linux driver that is
added to the main Linux kernel source tree. The driver will be written
by some of the members of the Linux kernel developer community (over
1500 strong and growing). This driver will then be automatically
included in all Linux distributions, including the "enterprise" ones.
It will be automatically kept up to date and working through all Linux
kernel API changes. This driver will work with all[1] of the different
CPU types supported by Linux, the largest number of CPU types supported
by any operating system ever before in the history of computing.
As for support, the driver will be supported through email by the
original developers, when they can help out, and by the "enterprise"
Linux distributors as part of their service agreements with their
customers.
If your company is worried about NDA issues surrounding your device's
specifications, we have arranged a program with OSDL/TLF's Tech Board to
provide the legal framework where a company can interact with a member
of the kernel community in order to properly assure that all needed NDA
requirements are fulfilled.
Now your developers will have more time to work on drivers for all of
the other operating systems out there, and you can add "supported on
Linux" to your product's marketing material.
This offer is in affect for all different types of devices, from USB
toys to PCI video devices to high-speed networking cards. If you build
it, we can get Linux drivers working for it.
For any questions about this program, please feel free to respond to
this email, or contact me directly at gr...@kroah.com. I will also be
available at FreedomHEC 2007 <http://freedomhec.pbwiki.com/> held
adjacent to WinHEC, if anyone wants to bring devices and work
face-to-face.
thanks,
greg k-h
[1] for the CPUs that support the bus types that your device works on.
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Rik van Riel
> Free Linux Driver Development!
Mind if I include this offer on http://kernelnewbies.org/UpstreamMerge ?
--
Politics is the struggle between those who want to make their country
the best in the world, and those who believe it already is. Each group
calls the other unpatriotic.
Greg KH
> Greg KH wrote:
> >Free Linux Driver Development!
>
> Mind if I include this offer on http://kernelnewbies.org/UpstreamMerge ?
Please do, spread it around as much as you want.
thanks,
greg k-h
Bauke Jan Douma
An offer they can't refuse.
> This offer is in affect for all different types of devices, from USB
> toys to PCI video devices to high-speed networking cards. If you build
> it, we can get Linux drivers working for it.
s/affect/effect/
and maybe
s/build/manufacture/ ??
bjd
Jan Engelhardt
>Subject: Free Linux Driver Development!
>
>Free Linux Driver Development!
>
>Yes, that's right, the Linux kernel community is offering all companies
>free Linux driver development. No longer do you have to suffer through
>all of the different examples in the Linux Device Driver Kit, or pick
>through the thousands of example drivers in the Linux kernel source
>tree trying to determine which one is the closest to what you need to
>do. [...]
Yay for quality over quantity :)
>This driver will work with all[1] of the different
>CPU types supported by Linux, the largest number of CPU types supported
>by any operating system ever before in the history of computing.
(How many do we support? How many does NetBSD?)
Wonderful idea!
Jan
--
ft: http://freshmeat.net/p/chaostables/
Florian Weimer
> Yes, that's right, the Linux kernel community is offering all companies
> free Linux driver development. No longer do you have to suffer through
> all of the different examples in the Linux Device Driver Kit, or pick
> through the thousands of example drivers in the Linux kernel source
> tree trying to determine which one is the closest to what you need to
> do.
Very nice spin indeed.
This reminds of the the utterly broken dl2k network driver (which has
got interrupt handling problems and doesn't properly synchronize with
DMA transfers, IIRC). Hardware specs are available, and I guess I
could even provide a hardware sample, maybe even two. (If the
community provides driver support, it shouldn't matter if the vendor
actually supports development.)
Manu Abraham
Sounds very nice indeed. Just happened to do a driver in a similar
status, where the vendor did not want to make the specs and other
stuff open, but was in a position to support an OSS driver for the
STB0899 demodulator driver from ST Microelectronics
I think many vendors will be ready to jump in.
the STB0899 demodulator driver is now available at
http://linuxtv.org/hg/~manu/stb0899-c5
It needs some fixes with regards to our DVB API. (bumping it up to 3.2
from 3.1) It's almost ready to rock now, with new delivery systems.
regards,
manu
Roland Dreier
> device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing to
> answer questions every once in a while. A few sample devices might be
> good to have so that debugging doesn't have to be done by email, but if
> necessary, that can be done.
> This driver will work with all[1] of the different
> CPU types supported by Linux, the largest number of CPU types supported
> by any operating system ever before in the history of computing.
> As for support, the driver will be supported through email by the
> original developers, when they can help out, and by the "enterprise"
> Linux distributors as part of their service agreements with their
> customers.
I'm all for openness of device programming specs, but I think it's a
bit disingenous to suggest that all a company has to do to get a
driver written and supported is throw some documentation over the
wall. And it's crazy to suggest that the driver will work on every
platform and be supported by enterprise distros.
Just look at the in-tree drivers: there are tons of them that don't
work on big-endian platforms, or have 64-bit problems, or have no SMP
support. And that doesn't even count drivers that are so bitrotted
they won't even build any more. And there are plenty of documented
devices that no one cares enough about to submit a driver for.
In the real world, a vendor that wants to make sure a device is
supported by Linux had better pay someone to write the driver and keep
it working. Of course, if the device is popular enough or simple
enough, docs are all that's needed, but in many cases no one competent
to write the driver is going to volunteer to do it.
- R.
Manu Abraham
Well, if the hardware is nice and is useful to many, there will be at
least a few handful who would ready to put in some effort to it. (We
are talking complex hardware only, not simple ones) Of course
development takes some time, in the order of a few months as opposed
to weeks. The vendor can of course the pay the author as well, which
will result in even better support.
regards,
manu
Jeff Garzik
> Just look at the in-tree drivers: there are tons of them that don't
> work on big-endian platforms, or have 64-bit problems, or have no SMP
> support. And that doesn't even count drivers that are so bitrotted
> they won't even build any more.
The vast majority of these were submitted ages ago. Standards for
acceptance and maintenance have risen since the days of ISA drivers and
floppy tape drives.
I think it's quite disingenuous to imply that a few bad apples are a
representative sample.
Jeff
Jeff V. Merkey
Great offer to folks for drivers, but it sends a mixed message. OSDL
should offer to host a page somewhere to coordinate all of this.
:-)
Jeff
Roland Dreier
> acceptance and maintenance have risen since the days of ISA drivers
> and floppy tape drives.
What are our standards for maintenance? How can we tell in advance if
something is going to be maintained (cf. drivers/net/chelsio)?
I don't think you can seriously argue that just posting documentation
is going to guarantee that a device is going to get a high-quality
driver that runs on all architectures and that enterprise distros will
support. And I don't think it's a good strategy to try convince
vendors to open docs by using happy talk about an idealized fantasy world.
- R.
Greg KH
> > All that is needed is some kind of specification that describes how your
> > device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing to
> > answer questions every once in a while. A few sample devices might be
> > good to have so that debugging doesn't have to be done by email, but if
> > necessary, that can be done.
>
> > This driver will work with all[1] of the different
> > CPU types supported by Linux, the largest number of CPU types supported
> > by any operating system ever before in the history of computing.
>
> > As for support, the driver will be supported through email by the
> > original developers, when they can help out, and by the "enterprise"
> > Linux distributors as part of their service agreements with their
> > customers.
>
> I'm all for openness of device programming specs, but I think it's a
> bit disingenous to suggest that all a company has to do to get a
> driver written and supported is throw some documentation over the
> wall. And it's crazy to suggest that the driver will work on every
> platform and be supported by enterprise distros.
Why is that crazy, we do that already today with the majority of drivers
in Linux.
> Just look at the in-tree drivers: there are tons of them that don't
> work on big-endian platforms, or have 64-bit problems, or have no SMP
> support. And that doesn't even count drivers that are so bitrotted
> they won't even build any more.
Like Jeff said, many of these are quite old.
> And there are plenty of documented devices that no one cares enough
> about to submit a driver for.
Any specific examples? I have a long list of people who wish to write
new drivers but just don't know which hardware is not yet supported.
> In the real world, a vendor that wants to make sure a device is
> supported by Linux had better pay someone to write the driver and keep
> it working. Of course, if the device is popular enough or simple
> enough, docs are all that's needed, but in many cases no one competent
> to write the driver is going to volunteer to do it.
That's not true at all. We have a whole raft of drivers in the kernel
that are supported only by the community (like the whole USB stack for
example) that vendors rely on working properly.
And again, I have a whole list of people who are competent to write
drivers wanting to do so (myself included), yet do not have any new
devices with specs to do it.
thanks,
greg k-h
Greg KH
>
> Sounds very nice indeed. Just happened to do a driver in a similar
> status, where the vendor did not want to make the specs and other
> stuff open, but was in a position to support an OSS driver for the
> STB0899 demodulator driver from ST Microelectronics
>
> I think many vendors will be ready to jump in.
Based on the initial response so far, a number of them seem very
willing.
> the STB0899 demodulator driver is now available at
>
> http://linuxtv.org/hg/~manu/stb0899-c5
>
> It needs some fixes with regards to our DVB API. (bumping it up to 3.2
> from 3.1) It's almost ready to rock now, with new delivery systems.
Glad to see that we are getting more device support :)
thanks,
greg k-h
Greg KH
> * Greg KH:
>
> > Yes, that's right, the Linux kernel community is offering all companies
> > free Linux driver development. No longer do you have to suffer through
> > all of the different examples in the Linux Device Driver Kit, or pick
> > through the thousands of example drivers in the Linux kernel source
> > tree trying to determine which one is the closest to what you need to
> > do.
>
> Very nice spin indeed.
>
> This reminds of the the utterly broken dl2k network driver (which has
> got interrupt handling problems and doesn't properly synchronize with
> DMA transfers, IIRC). Hardware specs are available, and I guess I
> could even provide a hardware sample, maybe even two. (If the
> community provides driver support, it shouldn't matter if the vendor
> actually supports development.)
Have you tried contacting the network driver developers to work these
issues out?
thanks,
greg k-h
Greg KH
> >This driver will work with all[1] of the different
> >CPU types supported by Linux, the largest number of CPU types supported
> >by any operating system ever before in the history of computing.
>
> (How many do we support? How many does NetBSD?)
We support at least 25 separate architectures, with a _huge_ variety of
different variations within those architectures. We passed NetBSD a
number of years ago (sorry, don't have their numbers around right now.)
thanks,
greg k-h
Greg KH
> Greg KH wrote on 30-01-07 02:29:
> An offer they can't refuse.
>
> >This offer is in affect for all different types of devices, from USB
> >toys to PCI video devices to high-speed networking cards. If you build
> >it, we can get Linux drivers working for it.
>
> s/affect/effect/
>
> and maybe
>
> s/build/manufacture/ ??
Heh, gotta love the grammer police (you were not the only one to point
these mistakes out by a long shot...)
thanks,
greg k-h
Dmitri Vorobiev
> Free Linux Driver Development!
Just curious, it is a coincidence or a thoughtful action that this offer
(which is undoubtedly very attractive and will definitely help the Linux
user base grow) is published on the very same day when a well-known
software giant releases a new Major Version of their closed-source
operating system?
Thanks,
Dmitri
Roland Dreier
> > bit disingenous to suggest that all a company has to do to get a
> > driver written and supported is throw some documentation over the
> > wall. And it's crazy to suggest that the driver will work on every
> > platform and be supported by enterprise distros.
>
> Why is that crazy, we do that already today with the majority of drivers
> in Linux.
Well, we can disagree about the majority of drivers. My feeling is
that most of the drivers that are really used by lots of people get
support beyond just a dump of docs -- in fact often vendors are
maintaining them, eg e1000, tg3, cciss, etc., to pick some running on
the boxes I have around here.
> > Just look at the in-tree drivers: there are tons of them that don't
> > work on big-endian platforms, or have 64-bit problems, or have no SMP
> > support. And that doesn't even count drivers that are so bitrotted
> > they won't even build any more.
>
> Like Jeff said, many of these are quite old.
OK, but why isn't your army of volunteers fixing them?
> > And there are plenty of documented devices that no one cares enough
> > about to submit a driver for.
>
> Any specific examples? I have a long list of people who wish to write
> new drivers but just don't know which hardware is not yet supported.
I have a Cisco USB webcam that supposedly conforms to the "USB Video
Device Class", but nothing happens when I plug it into my Linux box.
I assume the device class is specified as part of the USB spec...
And I seem to recall there's more SATA chipset documentation than Jeff
Garzik has time to implement support for.
> > In the real world, a vendor that wants to make sure a device is
> > supported by Linux had better pay someone to write the driver and keep
> > it working. Of course, if the device is popular enough or simple
> > enough, docs are all that's needed, but in many cases no one competent
> > to write the driver is going to volunteer to do it.
>
> That's not true at all. We have a whole raft of drivers in the kernel
> that are supported only by the community (like the whole USB stack for
> example) that vendors rely on working properly.
Sure, I agree 100% that the community can deliver great drivers when
sufficient interest, documentation, and testing resources are all
available. And of course sufficient interest and testing resources
can substitute for documentation and vendor support -- cf forcedeth,
which was written with no documentation at all.
I'm disagreeing with a stronger assertion -- your original email said
that if a vendor just dumps out hardware documentation and donates a
few devices, then that vendor will definitely get a driver that will
be picked up by enterprise distros and run on every Linux platform.
And that just isn't true, or at least experience shows it hasn't been
true until now.
- R.
Jan Engelhardt
On Jan 30 2007 11:14, Greg KH wrote:
>On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 11:52:48AM +0100, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>> >This driver will work with all[1] of the different
>> >CPU types supported by Linux, the largest number of CPU types supported
>> >by any operating system ever before in the history of computing.
>>
>> (How many do we support? How many does NetBSD?)
>
>We support at least 25 separate architectures, with a _huge_ variety of
>different variations within those architectures. We passed NetBSD a
>number of years ago (sorry, don't have their numbers around right now.)
Don't they claim 50+? Already browsing
ftp://ftp.de.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-3.1 gives more than 2
screenfuls [Ã 25].
Jan
--
ft: http://freshmeat.net/p/chaostables/
Bill Davidsen
of people using the program could go here as well.
Greg, did this go to the "announce" group as well? It should, some
people read that even if they can't cope with LKML volume.
--
Bill Davidsen <davi...@tmr.com>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
Jeff Garzik
> What are our standards for maintenance? How can we tell in advance if
> something is going to be maintained (cf. drivers/net/chelsio)?
>
> I don't think you can seriously argue that just posting documentation
> is going to guarantee that a device is going to get a high-quality
> driver that runs on all architectures and that enterprise distros will
> support.
Look up from infiniband once in and while, and... surprise... that's
what is actually happening. It sure seems to me like the drivers
maintained by hardware vendors directly is in the distinct minority,
illuminating irrefutable evidence that hardware vendors do in fact
receive high quality drivers in exchange for documentation (and
hardware) availability. IMO the drivers of the highest quality are
usually in the this category.
> And I don't think it's a good strategy to try convince
> vendors to open docs by using happy talk about an idealized fantasy world.
Agreed. That's why Greg was describing the real world of Linux kernel
development, rather than an idealized fantasy world.
How do you think you got all these highly portable ATA, USB, network,
and sound drivers, hmmm? The vast majority was just documentation and
hardware access. That's been the Linux way since 1993 (1991?).
Jeff
Florian Weimer
>> This reminds of the the utterly broken dl2k network driver (which has
>> got interrupt handling problems and doesn't properly synchronize with
>> DMA transfers, IIRC). Hardware specs are available, and I guess I
>> could even provide a hardware sample, maybe even two. (If the
>> community provides driver support, it shouldn't matter if the vendor
>> actually supports development.)
>
> Have you tried contacting the network driver developers to work these
> issues out?
Yes, sort of: <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/448446>
There weren't any replies, unfortunately. Do you think a repost would
make sense?
Our subsequent debugging revealed that either all the cards in our
sample were simply broken (but they seemed to work just fine with the
driver from FreeBSD-current), or something related to the DMA handling
in the driver was not quite right. It looked as if the kernel and the
NIC couldn't agree on the contents of the ring buffer.
Jeff Garzik
> Well, we can disagree about the majority of drivers. My feeling is
> that most of the drivers that are really used by lots of people get
> support beyond just a dump of docs -- in fact often vendors are
> maintaining them, eg e1000, tg3, cciss, etc., to pick some running on
> the boxes I have around here.
Check your history... tg3 was written by me and DaveM, and only after
years was it picked up by the vendor as their official Linux driver.
You have picked an excellent counter-example to your own argument.
> > > Just look at the in-tree drivers: there are tons of them that don't
> > > work on big-endian platforms, or have 64-bit problems, or have no SMP
> > > support. And that doesn't even count drivers that are so bitrotted
> > > they won't even build any more.
> >
> > Like Jeff said, many of these are quite old.
>
> OK, but why isn't your army of volunteers fixing them?
Because nobody has hardware for them?
> And I seem to recall there's more SATA chipset documentation than Jeff
> Garzik has time to implement support for.
I seriously doubt you can come up with even a single concrete example here.
Regardless, libata has 55+ drivers and counting, all for the price of
documentation and hardware. Another quite strong counter example.
> I'm disagreeing with a stronger assertion -- your original email said
> that if a vendor just dumps out hardware documentation and donates a
> few devices, then that vendor will definitely get a driver that will
> be picked up by enterprise distros and run on every Linux platform.
> And that just isn't true, or at least experience shows it hasn't been
> true until now.
What experience? AFAICS, pretty much all modern hardware in use outside
of ATI/NVIDIA graphics is supported by Linux.
All visible evidence points to support for Greg's assertion.
Jeff
Greg KH
>
> On Jan 30 2007 11:14, Greg KH wrote:
> >On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 11:52:48AM +0100, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> >> >This driver will work with all[1] of the different
> >> >CPU types supported by Linux, the largest number of CPU types supported
> >> >by any operating system ever before in the history of computing.
> >>
> >> (How many do we support? How many does NetBSD?)
> >
> >We support at least 25 separate architectures, with a _huge_ variety of
> >different variations within those architectures. We passed NetBSD a
> >number of years ago (sorry, don't have their numbers around right now.)
>
> Don't they claim 50+? Already browsing
> ftp://ftp.de.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-3.1 gives more than 2
Don't get confused by the fact that the majority of the NetBSD platforms
are sub-architectures. I'm talking about 25 unique CPU architectures.
Or is it 20. I haven't looked in a while, the tree is there for anyone
else to look at :)
And even then, I think just the pure number of variants of ARM and PPC
that we support is greater than NetBSD's sub-arch support too...
thanks,
greg k-h
Greg KH
> * Greg KH:
>
> >> This reminds of the the utterly broken dl2k network driver (which has
> >> got interrupt handling problems and doesn't properly synchronize with
> >> DMA transfers, IIRC). Hardware specs are available, and I guess I
> >> could even provide a hardware sample, maybe even two. (If the
> >> community provides driver support, it shouldn't matter if the vendor
> >> actually supports development.)
> >
> > Have you tried contacting the network driver developers to work these
> > issues out?
>
> Yes, sort of: <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/448446>
> There weren't any replies, unfortunately. Do you think a repost would
> make sense?
Try sending it to the netdev mailing list instead. Not all of the
network driver developers read the whole lkml firehose.
thanks,
greg k-h
Greg KH
> Greg KH ??????????:
> >Free Linux Driver Development!
>
> Just curious, it is a coincidence or a thoughtful action that this offer
> (which is undoubtedly very attractive and will definitely help the Linux
> user base grow) is published on the very same day when a well-known
> software giant releases a new Major Version of their closed-source
> operating system?
As I don't pay attention to other closed source operating systems, it
must have been coincidence. :)
thanks,
greg k-h
Diego Calleja
> Any specific examples? I have a long list of people who wish to write
> new drivers but just don't know which hardware is not yet supported.
It'd be interesting to join forces with the BSD guys in this field, they surely
support initiatives like this!
Greg KH
> > > I'm all for openness of device programming specs, but I think it's a
> > > bit disingenous to suggest that all a company has to do to get a
> > > driver written and supported is throw some documentation over the
> > > wall. And it's crazy to suggest that the driver will work on every
> > > platform and be supported by enterprise distros.
> >
> > Why is that crazy, we do that already today with the majority of drivers
> > in Linux.
>
> Well, we can disagree about the majority of drivers. My feeling is
> that most of the drivers that are really used by lots of people get
> support beyond just a dump of docs -- in fact often vendors are
> maintaining them, eg e1000, tg3, cciss, etc., to pick some running on
> the boxes I have around here.
If you recal, tg3 was created by the community because the vendor
refused to open their driver up. They only reluctantly now support it
because it went into the main kernel tree and the distros then refused
to accept the closed driver.
So there's a perfict example of what I'm talking about :)
Also, look at the rest of the system (ide, SATA, USB, firewire, driver
core, PCI, etc.) None of that was done by a vendor, but by the
community.
> > > Just look at the in-tree drivers: there are tons of them that don't
> > > work on big-endian platforms, or have 64-bit problems, or have no SMP
> > > support. And that doesn't even count drivers that are so bitrotted
> > > they won't even build any more.
> >
> > Like Jeff said, many of these are quite old.
>
> OK, but why isn't your army of volunteers fixing them?
They don't know about them, or they don't have the hardware to test?
Seriously, let the kernel-janitor's project know about any issues you
have and they will be glad to jump on it. Those people are just
chomping a the bit to do something a bit bigger than "compiler warning
cleanups" :)
> > > And there are plenty of documented devices that no one cares enough
> > > about to submit a driver for.
> >
> > Any specific examples? I have a long list of people who wish to write
> > new drivers but just don't know which hardware is not yet supported.
>
> I have a Cisco USB webcam that supposedly conforms to the "USB Video
> Device Class", but nothing happens when I plug it into my Linux box.
> I assume the device class is specified as part of the USB spec...
Are you sure? That spec just came out not so long ago and I haven't
seen any real devices support it just yet. That said, I do know of a
few people who are working on implementing the standard, try asking on
the linux-usb-devel mailing list to find out what their status is.
> And I seem to recall there's more SATA chipset documentation than Jeff
> Garzik has time to implement support for.
If so, he should let people know :)
> I'm disagreeing with a stronger assertion -- your original email said
> that if a vendor just dumps out hardware documentation and donates a
> few devices, then that vendor will definitely get a driver that will
> be picked up by enterprise distros and run on every Linux platform.
> And that just isn't true, or at least experience shows it hasn't been
> true until now.
Um, that's how Linux has gotten to where it is today and continues to
grow. Just because none of us wanted to do IB drivers, doesn't mean that
the model doesn't work for devices that are actually sane :)
thanks,
greg k-h
Greg KH
>
> Greg, did this go to the "announce" group as well? It should, some
> people read that even if they can't cope with LKML volume.
What "announce" group?
I noticed it hit /., so it is now being spread to a group wider than
lkml.
thanks,
greg k-h
Greg KH
> El Tue, 30 Jan 2007 11:10:20 -0800, Greg KH <gr...@kroah.com> escribi?:
>
> > Any specific examples? I have a long list of people who wish to write
> > new drivers but just don't know which hardware is not yet supported.
>
> It'd be interesting to join forces with the BSD guys in this field, they surely
> support initiatives like this!
I have worked with the BSD developers in the past, sharing
specifications and knowledge about how certian devices work in order to
help them get drivers up and running. So this sharing has happened in
the past, and still continues today.
thanks,
greg k-h
Andrew Lyon
> Free Linux Driver Development!
>
> Yes, that's right, the Linux kernel community is offering all companies
> free Linux driver development. No longer do you have to suffer through
> all of the different examples in the Linux Device Driver Kit, or pick
> through the thousands of example drivers in the Linux kernel source
> tree trying to determine which one is the closest to what you need to
> do.
>
> All that is needed is some kind of specification that describes how your
> device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing to
> answer questions every once in a while. A few sample devices might be
> good to have so that debugging doesn't have to be done by email, but if
> necessary, that can be done.
>
> In return, you will receive a complete and working Linux driver that is
> added to the main Linux kernel source tree. The driver will be written
> by some of the members of the Linux kernel developer community (over
> 1500 strong and growing). This driver will then be automatically
> included in all Linux distributions, including the "enterprise" ones.
> It will be automatically kept up to date and working through all Linux
> CPU types supported by Linux, the largest number of CPU types supported
> by any operating system ever before in the history of computing.
>
> original developers, when they can help out, and by the "enterprise"
> Linux distributors as part of their service agreements with their
> customers.
>
> If your company is worried about NDA issues surrounding your device's
> specifications, we have arranged a program with OSDL/TLF's Tech Board to
> provide the legal framework where a company can interact with a member
> of the kernel community in order to properly assure that all needed NDA
> requirements are fulfilled.
>
> the other operating systems out there, and you can add "supported on
> Linux" to your product's marketing material.
>
> This offer is in affect for all different types of devices, from USB
> toys to PCI video devices to high-speed networking cards. If you build
> it, we can get Linux drivers working for it.
>
> For any questions about this program, please feel free to respond to
> this email, or contact me directly at gr...@kroah.com. I will also be
> available at FreedomHEC 2007 <http://freedomhec.pbwiki.com/> held
> adjacent to WinHEC, if anyone wants to bring devices and work
> face-to-face.
>
> thanks,
>
> greg k-h
>
> [1] for the CPUs that support the bus types that your device works on.
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majo...@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
>
How about a kernel driver for the m-cubed tbalancer bigNG ?
http://www.t-balancer.com/english/bng.htm (see support section of site)
Complete documentation is available, and devs are friendly (see
forums), there is already a userspace utility that works well but a
kernel driver would be even better, especially for something that
controls system cooling!
Andy
Diego Calleja
> Don't they claim 50+? Already browsing
> ftp://ftp.de.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-3.1 gives more than 2
> screenfuls [Ã 25].
I don't know exactly how many architectures does netbsd run, but Linux seems
to support arches that netbsd doesn't, like: 64 bit MIPS, PPC 970 (available in
netbsd but not yet integrated i think), Cell, S390, M32R, Nec v850, frv, cris?,
xtensa, mmuless cpus (apparently there're lots of mmuless cpus), Itanium
(netbsd development ongoing)
Sure, Linux doesn't support vax and the like, but it does support lots of
architectures that matter. In http://netbsd.org/Ports/#ports-by-cpu there's a
more Linux-like view of the architectures supported. Although Netbsd people
will argue that porting a architecture to Linux is more difficult and that Linux
gets support just because there's a lot of $$$ around it.
Anyway, even if Linux wasn't the OS with more architectures supported
it'd be the _second_ on the list. Which is quite impressive anyway, and
nothing to be ashamed of.
Greg KH
>
> How about a kernel driver for the m-cubed tbalancer bigNG ?
>
> http://www.t-balancer.com/english/bng.htm (see support section of site)
>
> Complete documentation is available, and devs are friendly (see
> forums), there is already a userspace utility that works well but a
> kernel driver would be even better, especially for something that
> controls system cooling!
Why would a userspace driver not work out for this. We already can
saturate the USB bus with a userspace program, and since it requires a
userspace interaction to do something with the data, I don't really see
what a kernel driver could do to help thing out.
That being said, perhaps it would fit with the other USB data
acquisition drivers that we already have. Feel free to take this up
with me off-list if you want to.
Hm, wait, in looking at the specs for the device, it uses a
usb-to-serial chip that we already support quite well (with the
pl2303.ko driver.) So all you need to do is write some userspace
software that interacts with the device properly. No new kernel driver
is needed at all, as Linux already supports this hardware :)
thanks,
greg k-h
Jan Engelhardt
On Jan 30 2007 21:23, Diego Calleja wrote:
>
>Sure, Linux doesn't support vax and the like, but it does support lots of
>architectures that matter. In http://netbsd.org/Ports/#ports-by-cpu
>there's a more Linux-like view of the architectures supported. Although
>Netbsd people will argue that porting a architecture to Linux is more
>difficult and that Linux gets support just because there's a lot of $$$
>around it.
A real one time argument. There's much more $ around Windows and yet,
there are (I presume) almost only drivers for x86 (and slowly coming,
x86_64). IA64? Well, you probably don't run desktop peripherals there,
but vendors don't have a driver at hand easily.
Jan
--
Valdis.K...@vt.edu
> Greg KH wrote on 30-01-07 02:29:
> An offer they can't refuse.
>
> > toys to PCI video devices to high-speed networking cards. If you build
> > it, we can get Linux drivers working for it.
>
Correct.
> and maybe
>
> s/build/manufacture/ ??
We probably *want* to encourage them to come talk to us when the device is
still a "build" because it's in the design/prototype stage - that way we avoid
having to work around design brain damage and features that could have been
added but weren't because The Other OS wouldn't have used them.
Also, the people we want to talk to *are* the "build" people - it's quite
possble they farm out the mass manufacture to some other company that just
does the actual assembly of boards based on a CAD/CAM model they're given.
Roland Dreier
> > that most of the drivers that are really used by lots of people get
> > support beyond just a dump of docs -- in fact often vendors are
> > maintaining them, eg e1000, tg3, cciss, etc., to pick some running on
> > the boxes I have around here.
>
> Check your history... tg3 was written by me and DaveM, and only after
> years was it picked up by the vendor as their official Linux
> driver. You have picked an excellent counter-example to your own
> argument.
OK, fair enough, I forgot about tg3. But on the other hand, you wrote
it without docs, actually _in spite of_ Broadcom, right?
Which I think makes my point that documentation is neither necessary
nor sufficient for a good Linux driver. Documentation helps, but if
no one competent cares about the device then the driver won't get
written. On the other hand, if the device is important enough, the
driver will get written without documentation or vendor support.
> > OK, but why isn't your army of volunteers fixing them?
>
> Because nobody has hardware for them?
Greg said hardware wasn't necessary...
> > And I seem to recall there's more SATA chipset documentation than Jeff
> > Garzik has time to implement support for.
>
> I seriously doubt you can come up with even a single concrete example here.
Sorry, I thought you said there was interesting stuff to do with the
Promise documentation you got. I guess Nvidia ADMA is pretty much
done now.
> What experience? AFAICS, pretty much all modern hardware in use
> outside of ATI/NVIDIA graphics is supported by Linux.
Sure, popular hardware support is pretty good. But there are still
pretty serious gaps, for example Ralink wireless drivers are still not
upstream even with the vendor trying to help (and I think Ralink
wireless is a good example of how we can't really keep the promises
Greg is making).
And there's plenty of stuff in-tree with lots of users that's in
pretty dire shape, like ISDN (and the fact that we still
CONFIG_ISDN_I4L). OK, it's not "modern" but Greg is also promising
that we'll keep everything up-to-date with any upstream kernel
changes, and there's obviously large chunks of the driver tree where
that doesn't happen.
- R.
Roland Dreier
>
> They don't know about them, or they don't have the hardware to test?
> Seriously, let the kernel-janitor's project know about any issues you
> have and they will be glad to jump on it. Those people are just
> chomping a the bit to do something a bit bigger than "compiler warning
> cleanups" :)
I thought you said hardware to test wasn't necessary?
It's not particularly hard to find drivers that need work -- just
looking at everything protected by CONFIG_BROKEN would find plenty of
things to jump on. Or do "git grep 'cli(' drivers/".
> > I have a Cisco USB webcam that supposedly conforms to the "USB Video
> > Device Class", but nothing happens when I plug it into my Linux box.
> > I assume the device class is specified as part of the USB spec...
>
> Are you sure? That spec just came out not so long ago and I haven't
> seen any real devices support it just yet. That said, I do know of a
> few people who are working on implementing the standard, try asking on
> the linux-usb-devel mailing list to find out what their status is.
A quick web search finds http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/ but I don't see
any signs that anyone plans to submit it upstream.
> > I'm disagreeing with a stronger assertion -- your original email said
> > that if a vendor just dumps out hardware documentation and donates a
> > few devices, then that vendor will definitely get a driver that will
> > be picked up by enterprise distros and run on every Linux platform.
> > And that just isn't true, or at least experience shows it hasn't been
> > true until now.
> Um, that's how Linux has gotten to where it is today and continues to
> grow. Just because none of us wanted to do IB drivers, doesn't mean that
> the model doesn't work for devices that are actually sane :)
I disagree -- Linux today gets drivers not just from volunteers
writing drivers from specs, but also from vendors writing drivers and
volunteers writing drivers via reverse engineering. And many of those
drivers don't work on every platform and aren't supported by
enterprise distros. And when the community loses interest, drivers
are left to bitrot.
Hardware specs help. They help a lot. But they're neither necessary
nor sufficient for getting a high-quality Linux driver written. And
they definitely don't guarantee continuing maintenance.
- R.
Greg KH
> > > OK, but why isn't your army of volunteers fixing them?
> >
> > Because nobody has hardware for them?
>
> Greg said hardware wasn't necessary...
Someone has to have the hardware to test with. Hence my "debug by
email" comment.
> Sure, popular hardware support is pretty good. But there are still
> pretty serious gaps, for example Ralink wireless drivers are still not
> upstream even with the vendor trying to help (and I think Ralink
> wireless is a good example of how we can't really keep the promises
> Greg is making).
The Ralink wireless drivers are working to get their stuff upstream. I
think there is only some wireless infrastructure needed to complete
before it gets into mainline, but you will have to ask them about this.
There was a wireless-mini-summit a week or so ago, so those developers
all know what is going on in that space right now. They are facing a
number of different regulatory issues, combined with lack of
specifications from some vendors. I don't think that the developers who
actually have specs are complaining about anything right now.
> And there's plenty of stuff in-tree with lots of users that's in
> pretty dire shape, like ISDN (and the fact that we still
> CONFIG_ISDN_I4L). OK, it's not "modern" but Greg is also promising
> that we'll keep everything up-to-date with any upstream kernel
> changes, and there's obviously large chunks of the driver tree where
> that doesn't happen.
The ISDN maintainer has a large rewrite almost done, and anyone is
welcome to help him out if they are still using and needing that old
hardware. As almost no one objects to the current code, I'm guessing
that there is no such real need :)
thanks,
greg k-h
Roland Dreier
> think there is only some wireless infrastructure needed to complete
> before it gets into mainline, but you will have to ask them about this.
>
> There was a wireless-mini-summit a week or so ago, so those developers
> all know what is going on in that space right now. They are facing a
> number of different regulatory issues, combined with lack of
> specifications from some vendors. I don't think that the developers who
> actually have specs are complaining about anything right now.
OK, one last reply before I give up on this thread...
Sure, Ralink drivers will get upstream eventually. But by the time
the drivers get merged, Ralink will have stopped making the chips that
it supports (or so I read, http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/products/wireless/)!
I don't think that taking a year or two to merge a driver is going to
impress a vendor, especially since the reverse-engineered Broadcom
wireless driver is probably going to go upstream at just about the
same time.
An uncharitable vendor might decide it's not worth publishing specs,
since the Linux guys can reverse engineer the Windows driver just as
fast anyway.
- R.
Jeff Garzik
> > > Well, we can disagree about the majority of drivers. My feeling is
> > > that most of the drivers that are really used by lots of people get
> > > support beyond just a dump of docs -- in fact often vendors are
> > > maintaining them, eg e1000, tg3, cciss, etc., to pick some running on
> > > the boxes I have around here.
> >
> > Check your history... tg3 was written by me and DaveM, and only after
> > years was it picked up by the vendor as their official Linux
> > driver. You have picked an excellent counter-example to your own
> > argument.
>
> OK, fair enough, I forgot about tg3. But on the other hand, you wrote
> it without docs, actually _in spite of_ Broadcom, right?
>
> Which I think makes my point that documentation is neither necessary
> nor sufficient for a good Linux driver. Documentation helps, but if
> no one competent cares about the device then the driver won't get
> written. On the other hand, if the device is important enough, the
> driver will get written without documentation or vendor support.
That's your point?? I thought your point was (quoting your words)
> it's a
> bit disingenous to suggest that all a company has to do to get a
> driver written and supported is throw some documentation over the
> wall. And it's crazy to suggest that the driver will work on every
> platform and be supported by enterprise distros.
To repeat -- that's how most Linux drivers have been written,
/particularly/ the ones used most by users of enterprise distros.
> > > OK, but why isn't your army of volunteers fixing them?
> >
> > Because nobody has hardware for them?
>
> Greg said hardware wasn't necessary...
I did not say "no developers [...]"
I said "nobody"
> > > And I seem to recall there's more SATA chipset documentation than Jeff
> > > Garzik has time to implement support for.
> >
> > I seriously doubt you can come up with even a single concrete example here.
>
> Sorry, I thought you said there was interesting stuff to do with the
> Promise documentation you got.
Mikael took care of it already. And its supported by enterprise distros.
> I guess Nvidia ADMA is pretty much
> done now.
Yep. Without docs, even. And its supported by enterprise distros.
> > What experience? AFAICS, pretty much all modern hardware in use
> > outside of ATI/NVIDIA graphics is supported by Linux.
>
> Sure, popular hardware support is pretty good. But there are still
> pretty serious gaps, for example Ralink wireless drivers are still not
> upstream even with the vendor trying to help (and I think Ralink
> wireless is a good example of how we can't really keep the promises
> Greg is making).
How so? They appear to be working with wireless devs to get their
driver into the tree.
> And there's plenty of stuff in-tree with lots of users that's in
> pretty dire shape, like ISDN (and the fact that we still
> CONFIG_ISDN_I4L). OK, it's not "modern" but Greg is also promising
> that we'll keep everything up-to-date with any upstream kernel
> changes, and there's obviously large chunks of the driver tree where
> that doesn't happen.
Yes, large chunks of legacy ISA drivers, m68k drivers, and similar
situations where the userbase has dwindled to a handful over a decade.
Jeff
Jeff Garzik
> Sure, Ralink drivers will get upstream eventually. But by the time
> the drivers get merged, Ralink will have stopped making the chips that
> it supports (or so I read, http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/products/wireless/)!
> I don't think that taking a year or two to merge a driver is going to
> impress a vendor, especially since the reverse-engineered Broadcom
> wireless driver is probably going to go upstream at just about the
> same time.
You mean the bcm43xx wireless driver that's been upstream for months?
> An uncharitable vendor might decide it's not worth publishing specs,
> since the Linux guys can reverse engineer the Windows driver just as
> fast anyway.
Most vendors are likely to focus on examples that are in the statistical
(and competitive) majority, where publishing specs led to a driver
supported by an enterprise distro.
Jeff
Dave Airlie
> > all know what is going on in that space right now. They are facing a
> > number of different regulatory issues, combined with lack of
> > specifications from some vendors. I don't think that the developers who
> > actually have specs are complaining about anything right now.
>
> OK, one last reply before I give up on this thread...
>
> Sure, Ralink drivers will get upstream eventually. But by the time
> the drivers get merged, Ralink will have stopped making the chips that
> it supports (or so I read, http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/products/wireless/)!
> I don't think that taking a year or two to merge a driver is going to
> impress a vendor, especially since the reverse-engineered Broadcom
> wireless driver is probably going to go upstream at just about the
> same time.
>
> An uncharitable vendor might decide it's not worth publishing specs,
> since the Linux guys can reverse engineer the Windows driver just as
> fast anyway.
I'm sort of with Roland on this, the timelines aren't usually worth it
for a company to bother especially with complicated hardware, the time
taken to do a community graphics driver for any GPU where specs have
been available approaches infinity, unless the vendor actually does
the driver or pays someone to do the driver the hope of a community
supported driver reaching maturity while the product is still
available is slim.... for anyone desparate to start writing device
drivers, XGI have recently dropped a load of specs for their cards,
I'm not seeing anyone other than the usual GPU ppl step up an do
anything and as I said the time it takes a single volunteer to write a
GPU driver is a lot longer than the card...
Dave.
Roland Dreier
> > wrote
> > it without docs, actually _in spite of_ Broadcom, right?
> > Which I think makes my point that documentation is neither necessary
> > nor sufficient for a good Linux driver. Documentation helps, but if
> > no one competent cares about the device then the driver won't get
> > written. On the other hand, if the device is important enough, the
> > driver will get written without documentation or vendor support.
>
> That's your point?? I thought your point was (quoting your words)
>
> > it's a
> > bit disingenous to suggest that all a company has to do to get a
> > driver written and supported is throw some documentation over the
> > wall. And it's crazy to suggest that the driver will work on every
> > platform and be supported by enterprise distros.
>
> To repeat -- that's how most Linux drivers have been written,
> /particularly/ the ones used most by users of enterprise distros.
I thought you wrote tg3 without docs and without help from Broadcom?
To repeat, my point is that the drivers used most by users of
enterprise distros will get written with or without vendor docs or
help. Drivers for hardware that only a few people care about probably
won't be written and definitely won't be maintained by volunteers even
if the vendor publishes docs. And I think that's pretty much what I
said in both of the paragraphs you quoted above.
- R.
Roland Dreier
Sorry, yes. For some reason I thought it was blocked on the dscape
merge but obviously I was wrong. So a reverse-engineered driver got
upstream WAY FASTER than a driver where the vendor published specs and
GPLed source.
Why did that happen? I would argue that it was because way more
people cared about the broadcom driver (since the chip was in apple
laptops and the wrt54g among other things). That developer and user
interest is more important than the info provided by the vendor.
Anyway, I broke my first promise to drop this thread, but I'll make
the promise again now...
- R.
Matthieu CASTET
> > And I seem to recall there's more SATA chipset documentation than Jeff
> > Garzik has time to implement support for.
>
> I seriously doubt you can come up with even a single concrete example here.
>
> Regardless, libata has 55+ drivers and counting, all for the price of
> documentation and hardware. Another quite strong counter example.
>
On another side, some PATA drivers are incomplete or missing.
When we switch to PATA and drop old ide stack, what will happen ?
Will all driver be ported and full-feature, or some will be obsoleted ?
Matthieu
Manu Abraham
> >
> > Sounds very nice indeed. Just happened to do a driver in a similar
> > status, where the vendor did not want to make the specs and other
> > stuff open, but was in a position to support an OSS driver for the
> > STB0899 demodulator driver from ST Microelectronics
> >
> > I think many vendors will be ready to jump in.
>
> Based on the initial response so far, a number of them seem very
> willing.
>
> > the STB0899 demodulator driver is now available at
> >
> > http://linuxtv.org/hg/~manu/stb0899-c5
> >
> > It needs some fixes with regards to our DVB API. (bumping it up to 3.2
> > from 3.1) It's almost ready to rock now, with new delivery systems.
>
> Glad to see that we are getting more device support :)
>
Not only that, we will be adding in even more delivery systems like
DVB-S2, DVB-H, DSS and other than that, we will be having algorithm
based tuning rather than dumb tuning.
regards,
manu
Lennart Sorensen
> You mean the bcm43xx wireless driver that's been upstream for months?
And seems to do 802.11b only and screw up the eeprom settings so that
the windows driver gets confused next time you boot windows. Lovely
driver. If the bios on the laptop in question would let me change the
minipci card I would. To something with a ralink on it.
Seems the ralink driver maintainers are doing a lot of the work on the
core wifi infastructure too. Lots of work beyond just the driver then.
--
Len Sorensen
Trent Waddington
> I'm sort of with Roland on this, the timelines aren't usually worth it
> for a company to bother especially with complicated hardware, the time
> taken to do a community graphics driver for any GPU where specs have
> been available approaches infinity, unless the vendor actually does
> the driver or pays someone to do the driver the hope of a community
> supported driver reaching maturity while the product is still
> available is slim.... for anyone desparate to start writing device
> drivers, XGI have recently dropped a load of specs for their cards,
> I'm not seeing anyone other than the usual GPU ppl step up an do
> anything and as I said the time it takes a single volunteer to write a
> GPU driver is a lot longer than the card...
All this sounds like a lack of organisation on the side of the
community to me. Greg saying that he and others are twiddling their
thumbs because they don't know what hardware needs drivers says that
too. Where is the list of hardware-without-drivers? Until recently
there hasn't even been a list of hardware-with-binary-only-drivers
[1]. So anyone who has the necessary skills and thinks gee, I might
have a go at writing a linux kernel driver, has no idea where to go or
what to do. I wonder how many vendors have a policy of just ignoring
emails from hackers asking for specifications because they have
already given the specifications to Redhat or someone else, but
hackers just keep asking them again and again.
Trent
1. see http://developer.osdl.org/dev/opendrivers/wiki/index.php/Binary_Kernel_Modules_List
for a partial list.
Lennart Sorensen
> I disagree -- Linux today gets drivers not just from volunteers
> writing drivers from specs, but also from vendors writing drivers and
> volunteers writing drivers via reverse engineering. And many of those
> drivers don't work on every platform and aren't supported by
> enterprise distros. And when the community loses interest, drivers
> are left to bitrot.
I would much rather see a driver bit rot due to lack of interest than
see hardware go to the scrap heap because the vendor stoped caring about
it and you are SOL. Happens every time a new windows version comes out.
lots of working hardware suddenly becomes useless. At least on linux I
can keep using it if I want to until I decide not to try and maintain
the driver (if no one else is doing it). A driver with bitrot is a lot
better than no driver at all.
--
Len Sorensen
Alan
>
One of the problems if lack of hardware. It's very hard to fix a
prehistoric serial driver if you don't have an ISA bus box with the
needed slot let alone the card.
And why bother - its hardware that works on all the cases that matter
> Device Class", but nothing happens when I plug it into my Linux box.
> I assume the device class is specified as part of the USB spec...
UVC is "interesting", in a bad kind of interesting sort of way. See
http://developer.berlios.de/projects/linux-uvc however
Jeff Garzik
> I disagree -- Linux today gets drivers not just from volunteers
> writing drivers from specs, but also from vendors writing drivers and
> volunteers writing drivers via reverse engineering. And many of those
> drivers don't work on every platform and aren't supported by
> enterprise distros. And when the community loses interest, drivers
> are left to bitrot.
Which of these actively maintained and supported drivers work on only
one platform[1], and are excluded from enterprise distros? Can we truly
count them as "many", as you repeatedly claim?
Jeff
[1] obviously excluding drivers for hardware where its only possible to
occur on one platform, like SoC devices
Jeff Garzik
> All this sounds like a lack of organisation on the side of the
> community to me. Greg saying that he and others are twiddling their
> thumbs because they don't know what hardware needs drivers says that
> too. Where is the list of hardware-without-drivers? Until recently
> there hasn't even been a list of hardware-with-binary-only-drivers
> [1]. So anyone who has the necessary skills and thinks gee, I might
> have a go at writing a linux kernel driver, has no idea where to go or
> what to do. I wonder how many vendors have a policy of just ignoring
> emails from hackers asking for specifications because they have
> already given the specifications to Redhat or someone else, but
> hackers just keep asking them again and again.
I think this is a quite fair criticism, and I would love to see someone
step up and help with this sort of organization.
For example, I didn't know that XGI graphics specs were available at
all, otherwise it might have been something fun to tackle.
Jeff
Jeff Garzik
> Jeff Garzik <jeff <at> garzik.org> writes:
>
>>> And I seem to recall there's more SATA chipset documentation than Jeff
>>> Garzik has time to implement support for.
>> I seriously doubt you can come up with even a single concrete example here.
>>
>> Regardless, libata has 55+ drivers and counting, all for the price of
>> documentation and hardware. Another quite strong counter example.
>>
> On another side, some PATA drivers are incomplete or missing.
Which ones are incomplete?
I know a few non-x86 drivers are missing.
> When we switch to PATA and drop old ide stack, what will happen ?
> Will all driver be ported and full-feature, or some will be obsoleted ?
All drivers for which we can find users will be ported. If any features
disappear that's a bug.
Jeff
Roland Dreier
> one platform[1], and are excluded from enterprise distros? Can we
> truly count them as "many", as you repeatedly claim?
Why do we restrict this to actively maintained and supported drivers
(I think abandonware drivers are highly relevant here...)? And why
are you asking about drivers that work on only one platform? Greg
promised support for every platform that has the right bus to plug a
device into. So things like drivers that don't work on SMP or 64-bit
or big-endian platforms also violate that pledge, even if there's more
than one 32-bit little-endian uniprocessor platform where the driver
does work.
Anyway, grepping for stuff like BROKEN or !64BIT or X86 in the Kconfig
dependencies under drivers/ finds tons of hits. I don't have time to
scan through and figure out which meet your criteria, and I honestly
don't know how enterprise distros decide what to support. For example
RHEL4 seems to ship aha152x (which depends on ISA && SCSI && !64BIT),
but what will RH do if someone actually wants support for it?
I don't really understand why it's so hard to accept that sometimes
even open specs aren't enough to get great Linux support.
- R.
Alan
>
> When we switch to PATA and drop old ide stack, what will happen ?
> Will all driver be ported and full-feature, or some will be obsoleted ?
At the moment unless anyone gets upset I expect to obsolete the CMD640
but nothing else PCI. Can't comment on non x86 drivers and that may be up
to port maintainers, and in part to polishing the core code to handle it
better.
Some vendors are trialling a libata switch in their upcoming
distributions and the only barrier I expect to need some quick fixing is
the HPA support.
Alan
Jeff Garzik
> I thought you wrote tg3 without docs and without help from Broadcom?
We had docs and Broadcom's GPL'd driver.
> To repeat, my point is that the drivers used most by users of
> enterprise distros will get written with or without vendor docs or
> help. Drivers for hardware that only a few people care about probably
> won't be written and definitely won't be maintained by volunteers even
> if the vendor publishes docs. And I think that's pretty much what I
> said in both of the paragraphs you quoted above.
You're changing your story. After first over-simplifying what Greg
posted, you were complaining about Greg being disingenuous, when in fact
Greg was doing nothing but describing (in a new and different way) how
Linux drivers are already written.
Furthermore, presuming that drivers "definitely won't be maintained by
volunteers" is rather presumptuous considering that volunteers are
lining up, according to Greg.
I'm glad I didn't have a negative nelly like you around when I first got
into fbdev driver hacking, my entry into the Linux kernel world. "Don't
bother, son, nobody wants you around anyway."
Jeff
Greg KH
> > Which of these actively maintained and supported drivers work on only
> > one platform[1], and are excluded from enterprise distros? Can we
> > truly count them as "many", as you repeatedly claim?
>
> Why do we restrict this to actively maintained and supported drivers
> (I think abandonware drivers are highly relevant here...)? And why
> are you asking about drivers that work on only one platform? Greg
> promised support for every platform that has the right bus to plug a
> device into. So things like drivers that don't work on SMP or 64-bit
> or big-endian platforms also violate that pledge, even if there's more
> than one 32-bit little-endian uniprocessor platform where the driver
> does work.
For almost all _new_ drivers, this is the case. They are well supported
and build on all platforms.
Yes, there are plenty of old drivers that are marked BROKEN (look at the
scsi tree for some examples there), and some that still use cli (which
the kernel janitors keep trying to fix up but the very fact that no one
has the hardware to test their changes keeps that effort from going
anywhere.) But that is not the case for new stuff, nor is it the case
for things I am offing here.
> I don't really understand why it's so hard to accept that sometimes
> even open specs aren't enough to get great Linux support.
Yeah, sometimes you really need someone who has the device in a machine
that still boots :)
thanks,
greg k-h
Jeff Garzik
> > Which of these actively maintained and supported drivers work on only
> > one platform[1], and are excluded from enterprise distros? Can we
> > truly count them as "many", as you repeatedly claim?
>
> Why do we restrict this to actively maintained and supported drivers
> (I think abandonware drivers are highly relevant here...)? And why
> are you asking about drivers that work on only one platform? Greg
> promised support for every platform that has the right bus to plug a
> device into. So things like drivers that don't work on SMP or 64-bit
> or big-endian platforms also violate that pledge, even if there's more
> than one 32-bit little-endian uniprocessor platform where the driver
> does work.
You were complaining about drivers that work on only one platform.
Thus, I asked for list of said drivers, drivers that break Greg's pledge.
I'm betting they are uniformly ancient ISA or m68k or whatnot drivers.
> Anyway, grepping for stuff like BROKEN or !64BIT or X86 in the Kconfig
> dependencies under drivers/ finds tons of hits. I don't have time to
> scan through and figure out which meet your criteria, and I honestly
Translation: you don't have a clue what you are talking about, because
you haven't even bothered to do such a search yourself.
This is /your/ criteria we are discussing. /You/ keep talking about
"many" (your words) non-portable and broken drivers. And now you
actively avoid citing examples. Oh, except for one: aha154x, an
ancient ISA driver. So, yes, I concede that if a vendor appears and
wants to push in a new driver for ancient ISA hardware that nobody in
the planet uses... it might not find a volunteer. Hooray for goofy
examples.
> I don't really understand why it's so hard to accept that sometimes
> even open specs aren't enough to get great Linux support.
And hooray for shifting arguments. If this is your summary of the
thread, do you now concede that Greg was not being disingenuous? Open
specs was not the sum toto of Greg's piece.
Jeff
Roland Dreier
> platform. Thus, I asked for list of said drivers, drivers that break
> Greg's pledge.
When did I ever say "one platform"? If I did, it was an error -- I've
tried to consistently talk about not every platform.
> I'm betting they are uniformly ancient ISA or m68k or whatnot drivers.
So what? Greg didn't restrict his offer to "mainstream" devices. And
Greg said "[the driver] will be automatically kept up to date and
working through all Linux kernel API changes." Not "we'll maintain
the driver until we lose interest." And anyway, if I dig for a few
minutes I find modern mainstream stuff like ipw2200 that is seemingly
x86-only. (Although of course ipw2200 is straight from Intel)
> And hooray for shifting arguments. If this is your summary of the
> thread, do you now concede that Greg was not being disingenuous? Open
> specs was not the sum toto of Greg's piece.
Perhaps "disingenous" was the wrong choice of word, though, since you
and Greg seem to sincerely believe that a spec dump is all that a
vendor needs to do. I'll concede that maybe I should have used the
word "naive" instead. But I absolutely feel that Greg should not be
making promises on behalf of "the Linux kernel community."
Go back and reread Greg's original email. He said:
> All that is needed is some kind of specification that describes how
> your device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing
> to answer questions every once in a while. A few sample devices might
> be good to have so that debugging doesn't have to be done by email,
> but if necessary, that can be done.
Let me repeat Greg's words one more time: "All that is needed is some
kind of specification." So I honestly don't know what you mean by
"open specs was not the sum toto of Greg's piece."
Here is what he promised once that spec is released:
> In return, you will receive a complete and working Linux driver that
> is added to the main Linux kernel source tree.
..
> This driver will then be automatically included in all Linux
> distributions, including the "enterprise" ones. It will be
> automatically kept up to date and working through all Linux kernel
> API changes. This driver will work with all of the different CPU
> types supported by Linux, the largest number of CPU types supported
> by any operating system ever before in the history of computing.
..
> As for support, the driver will be supported through email by the
> original developers, when they can help out, and by the
> "enterprise" Linux distributors as part of their service agreements
> with their customers.
..
> This offer is in effect for all different types of devices, from USB
> toys to PCI video devices to high-speed networking cards. If you
> manufacture it, we can get Linux drivers working for it.
To me, it's clear that historically the community hasn't delivered on
this. So I don't like promising something that we haven't been able
to follow through on in the past. If a vendor takes Greg's offer, and
then the community, for whatever reason, fails to deliver on
everything, then that makes us all (including me!) look bad just
because of Greg's hyperbolic promises.
- R.
Robert Hancock
>> I guess Nvidia ADMA is pretty much
>> done now.
>
> Yep. Without docs, even. And its supported by enterprise distros.
Well, the "docs" I was using was a half-finished, broken version of the
driver released by NVidia which had to be significantly revised, and the
public ADMA spec which the hardware was vaguely based on and which a few
things could be inferred from. If NVidia had just released the docs it
would have been much easier, I would have gladly written it from
scratch. There are still things in the driver that could likely be
improved if we had the actual hardware documents, registers that we
don't know what half the bits are for, etc.
Having the vendor release a driver without hardware information is fine,
as long as it works perfectly or they maintain it when bugs are found.
Otherwise, anyone else trying to fix it will end up with an exercise in
"why was it doing this? should it be doing this instead?"
--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
To email, remove "nospam" from hanc...@nospamshaw.ca
Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/
John W. Linville
> > You mean the bcm43xx wireless driver that's been upstream for months?
>
> Sorry, yes. For some reason I thought it was blocked on the dscape
> merge but obviously I was wrong. So a reverse-engineered driver got
> upstream WAY FASTER than a driver where the vendor published specs and
> GPLed source.
>
> Why did that happen? I would argue that it was because way more
> people cared about the broadcom driver (since the chip was in apple
> laptops and the wrt54g among other things). That developer and user
> interest is more important than the info provided by the vendor.
That may be partially true. But the main reason is that the rt2x00
team chose to depend upon the heretofore unmergeable devicescape stack.
In contrast, the bcm43xx driver had a port for the ieee80211+softmac
stack that was ready for merge much earlier. This is more a result
of confusion in one area of kernel development than an indictment of
Linux drivers in general.
FWIW, we are closing-in on a merge for the devicescape stack.
(No, really!) So, hopefully wireless will soon cease to be such a
fertile ground for bad examples...
Thanks,
John
--
John W. Linville
linv...@tuxdriver.com
Manu Abraham
> To me, it's clear that historically the community hasn't delivered on
> this. So I don't like promising something that we haven't been able
> to follow through on in the past. If a vendor takes Greg's offer, and
> then the community, for whatever reason, fails to deliver on
> everything, then that makes us all (including me!) look bad just
> because of Greg's hyperbolic promises.
I can't talk for every subsystem, but what we have under the DVB
subsystem, for the devices that we have access to specs we have well
behaved drivers, many have even complimented that they work much
better than their windows counterparts.
I have even received mails from some vendors that some of the Linux
drivers behave better than their own windows drivers.
We can't count on reverse eng 'd drivers (or even drivers written with
a lot of guess work due to lack of specifications), they don't behave
nice. So at least if the vendors were to provide some specs in that
direction, it would help to make those drivers better.
So i think to a certain as to what i can say, probably you are wrong.
regards,
manu
Jeff Garzik
> To me, it's clear that historically the community hasn't delivered on
How is that clear? As noted in the specific examples I provided, that
is how a large number of popular drivers and subsystems have been developed.
> this. So I don't like promising something that we haven't been able
> to follow through on in the past. If a vendor takes Greg's offer, and
It's a good thing we've delivered on this, throughout Linux's history, then.
> then the community, for whatever reason, fails to deliver on
> everything, then that makes us all (including me!) look bad just
> because of Greg's hyperbolic promises.
The only difference between Greg's offer and offers made by other
developers to vendors is that his was public on LKML, and the subject
line concluded with an exclamation point.
I tell hardware vendors the same thing all the time -- just get the
specs to me or another capable developer, and we'll work with you to get
Linux support going.
So far, we have ATA, USB, ethernet, audio, and several other positive
examples of this working in the real world. And your counter-examples?
Ancient ISA drivers.
Jeff
Greg KH
>
> The only difference between Greg's offer and offers made by other
> developers to vendors is that his was public on LKML, and the subject
> line concluded with an exclamation point.
Heh, never underestimate a well-placed ! :)
Also, one big and new portion is the fact that we now have in place a
system to handle NDAs for those companies that do not wish to provide
specs to the whole world.
thanks,
greg k-h
Roland Dreier
>
> How is that clear? As noted in the specific examples I provided, that
> is how a large number of popular drivers and subsystems have been
> developed.
Yes, I agree that it often works. What I'm arguing is that it doesn't
ALWAYS work. And Greg is promising (in effect, on my behalf) that "If
you give us specs, then we WILL have drivers." As I've said several
times, I'm all for encouraging vendors to open specs. The only thing
I don't like is marketing open specs by making promises that we may
not be able to keep.
> The only difference between Greg's offer and offers made by other
> developers to vendors is that his was public on LKML, and the subject
> line concluded with an exclamation point.
>
> I tell hardware vendors the same thing all the time -- just get the
> specs to me or another capable developer, and we'll work with you to
> get Linux support going.
There's a big difference, because Greg's offer goes to every vendor,
present and future, and promises a perfect driver in return for a spec
dump. I have no problem with what you're telling vendors. And I
think it's worth noting that you say, "we'll work with you to get
Linux support going." You don't say, "all we need is specs to get
your driver into enterprise distros" -- you say that vendors need to
"work" with us, not just dump specs.
> So far, we have ATA, USB, ethernet, audio, and several other positive
> examples of this working in the real world. And your
> counter-examples? Ancient ISA drivers.
I think that's somewhat of a misrepresentation. So far in this
thread, I've also raised Ralink wireless (stuck out-of-tree until
after the HW is EOLed) and USB Video Class (apparently also stuck out
of tree, in spite of vendor support from Logitech). And Dave Airlie
mentioned XGI 3d HW.
Again, yes, I admit that releasing specs usually is the best way to
get Linux support. Just don't promise (on my behalf) a perfectly
portable driver that will be maintained forever if only a vendor will
release specs. Sometimes it works -- heck, usually it works -- as
long as there's a developer interested.
I think the message we should be sending is something more like:
There are lots of people who are happy to write Linux drivers, given
specs. Releasing specs is the best, easiest way to get Linux
support written at minimal cost. The advantages to this for a
hardware vendor are:
- the driver is likely to be merged upstream, which has several
benefits (continuing maintenance, distro inclusion, etc).
- the driver is likely to be portable to any platform where the
device physically has a chance at working.
And we even have this new mechanism for managing specs that you can
only release under NDA.
And that that last NDA management bit really is the big news, which
gets lost in the way Greg phrased things. (I've buried the lede in my
message too -- someone with more marketing savvy should rewrite it)
- R.
Adrian Bunk
> On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 09:45:50AM -0800, Roland Dreier wrote:
>...
> > And there are plenty of documented devices that no one cares enough
> > about to submit a driver for.
>
> Any specific examples? I have a long list of people who wish to write
> new drivers but just don't know which hardware is not yet supported.
>...
Wrinting a driver for shiny new hardware is cool.
But understanding and maintaining an already existing driver and working
on bug reports for this driver is something not-so-cool that would be
required in many areas of the kernel.
Would someone from your long list of people e.g. be willing to maintain
drivers/block/floppy.c ?
> thanks,
>
> greg k-h
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
Trent Waddington
> Would someone from your long list of people e.g. be willing to maintain
> drivers/block/floppy.c ?
I have a floppy drive! Will have to go buy some disks though. What's
wrong with it?
Trent
Greg KH
> On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 11:10:20AM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 09:45:50AM -0800, Roland Dreier wrote:
> >...
> > > And there are plenty of documented devices that no one cares enough
> > > about to submit a driver for.
> >
> > Any specific examples? I have a long list of people who wish to write
> > new drivers but just don't know which hardware is not yet supported.
> >...
>
> Wrinting a driver for shiny new hardware is cool.
>
> But understanding and maintaining an already existing driver and working
> on bug reports for this driver is something not-so-cool that would be
> required in many areas of the kernel.
>
> Would someone from your long list of people e.g. be willing to maintain
> drivers/block/floppy.c ?
What? Throw a fresh-faced newbie instantly into the tar-pit of despair
that floppy.c is? Do you want everyone just to run screaming from
kernel development never to be seen again?
:)
Seriously, if you need help with something like this, bring it up on the
kernel-janitors list, there are lots of people there that are willing to
help out with stuff like long-term maintenance and bug fixing but don't
know where to start.
That's also where the majority of the people who have volunteered to
help are also hanging out at.
thanks,
greg k-h
Greg KH
> > > To me, it's clear that historically the community hasn't delivered on
> >
> > How is that clear? As noted in the specific examples I provided, that
> > is how a large number of popular drivers and subsystems have been
> > developed.
>
> Yes, I agree that it often works. What I'm arguing is that it doesn't
> ALWAYS work. And Greg is promising (in effect, on my behalf) that "If
> you give us specs, then we WILL have drivers." As I've said several
> times, I'm all for encouraging vendors to open specs. The only thing
> I don't like is marketing open specs by making promises that we may
> not be able to keep.
I really think we can keep these promises. A number of us have been
doing just that for many years now, and I don't see any reason why we
would stop doing that now.
I would _love_ to be inundated with specs, so many that we run out of
developers to work on the devices. But I really don't see that
happening any time soon, as there's not that many devices that Linux
doesn't already support.
And if such a situation does happen, perhaps I will be able to convince
some distro companies to pony up the development man-power to help us
from going back on our promise... I know quite a few companies would
love to help out just a "problem" as it is in their best interest to
have Linux support as many devices as possible.
So please, don't be so down on the offer, you don't have to do any work
if you don't want to :)
thanks,
greg k-h
Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz
> On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 02:13:40AM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 11:10:20AM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> > > On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 09:45:50AM -0800, Roland Dreier wrote:
> > >...
> > > > And there are plenty of documented devices that no one cares enough
> > > > about to submit a driver for.
> > >
> > > Any specific examples? I have a long list of people who wish to write
> > > new drivers but just don't know which hardware is not yet supported.
> > >...
> >
> > Wrinting a driver for shiny new hardware is cool.
> >
> > But understanding and maintaining an already existing driver and working
> > on bug reports for this driver is something not-so-cool that would be
> > required in many areas of the kernel.
> >
> > Would someone from your long list of people e.g. be willing to maintain
> > drivers/block/floppy.c ?
>
> What? Throw a fresh-faced newbie instantly into the tar-pit of despair
> that floppy.c is? Do you want everyone just to run screaming from
> kernel development never to be seen again?
>
> :)
>
> Seriously, if you need help with something like this, bring it up on the
> kernel-janitors list, there are lots of people there that are willing to
> help out with stuff like long-term maintenance and bug fixing but don't
> know where to start.
:)
Bart
Adrian Bunk
> On 1/31/07, Adrian Bunk <bu...@stusta.de> wrote:
> >Would someone from your long list of people e.g. be willing to maintain
> >drivers/block/floppy.c ?
>
> I have a floppy drive! Will have to go buy some disks though. What's
> wrong with it?
There isn't something specific wrong.
It's simply that the last time someone completely understood this 120 kB
driver was in the last millenium.
That comes up every few months when some bug report arrives or in the
cases when a patch breaks the floppy driver.
> Trent
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
-
Adrian Bunk
> On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 02:13:40AM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 11:10:20AM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> > > On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 09:45:50AM -0800, Roland Dreier wrote:
> > >...
> > > > And there are plenty of documented devices that no one cares enough
> > > > about to submit a driver for.
> > >
> > > Any specific examples? I have a long list of people who wish to write
> > > new drivers but just don't know which hardware is not yet supported.
> > >...
> >
> > Wrinting a driver for shiny new hardware is cool.
> >
> > But understanding and maintaining an already existing driver and working
> > on bug reports for this driver is something not-so-cool that would be
> > required in many areas of the kernel.
> >
> > Would someone from your long list of people e.g. be willing to maintain
> > drivers/block/floppy.c ?
>
> What? Throw a fresh-faced newbie instantly into the tar-pit of despair
> that floppy.c is? Do you want everyone just to run screaming from
> kernel development never to be seen again?
>
> :)
Other than with the ISA drivers example, at least everyone has the
hardware... ;-)
> Seriously, if you need help with something like this, bring it up on the
> kernel-janitors list, there are lots of people there that are willing to
> help out with stuff like long-term maintenance and bug fixing but don't
> know where to start.
>
> That's also where the majority of the people who have volunteered to
> help are also hanging out at.
The idea of some kind of task list already appeared in this thread -
this might be the best way to publish and track such issues.
> thanks,
>
> greg k-h
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
-
Michael K. Edwards
> Free Linux Driver Development!
>
> Yes, that's right, the Linux kernel community is offering all companies
> free Linux driver development. ...
[snip]
> [1] for the CPUs that support the bus types that your device works on.
Bravo! Now, is there a message in the same spirit that can be
tailored to embedded space, especially to SoC vendors and (even more
importantly) their customers? Something along the lines of:
"We understand that embedded hardware is frequently buggy and that SoC
vendors are doing well if their own internal software people can get
enough help from the chip guys to bring up enough customer-driven use
cases to win a few design-ins.
We sympathize with embedded developers who stay up nights with an
O-scope and a JTAG emulator reverse-engineering the hardware behavior,
trying to figure out which this order of operations works and this
other one doesn't.
We have the software tools and the competence to quantify the
potential gains from current toolchains and kernels, aggressive
compilation options, and in-tree power/latency management strategies,
so that you can build a business case against "fire and forget" SDKs
based on ancient compilers, obsolete kernels, and unmaintained
out-of-tree patches.
We will help platform integrators bridge the gap between the chip
architects' claims about device performance and the condition in which
the BSP guys toss drivers over the fence.
You can hang onto the hardware and profit from coaching and code
review, or you can send us a board and whatever doco you've got, and
we'll figure it out.
All we ask is that 1) SoC vendors authorize customers to do an NDA
with OSDL and pass vendor NDA material along to us; 2) when the
product ships, all participants are free to exercise GPL rights with
respect to the chip support and driver code produced; and 3) platform
integrators cooperate with the rework usually needed as code merges
towards Linus's tree."
Or is this a pipe dream?
Cheers,
- Michael
Andrey Borzenkov
>> When we switch to PATA and drop old ide stack, what will happen ?
>> Will all driver be ported and full-feature, or some will be obsoleted ?
>
> All drivers for which we can find users will be ported. If any features
> disappear that's a bug.
>
Well, I have a long standing issue with pata_ali not detecting CD-ROM in DMA
mode. When I rarely watch DVD I rather boot into legacy IDE kernel ...
-andrey
Greg KH
Oh, I would love to see something like that happen :)
As I come from an embedded background, I love to see Linux running in
tiny systems. So anything I can do to help out with that I'd love to
offer.
But being able to read the minds of SOC hardwre engineers and decode all
of the documentation errors they produce is enough to drive one crazy,
my condolences go out to everyone in that situation...
good luck,
greg k-h
Kumar Gala
Thanks. It gets even better when they change things between
revisions of the same HW block.
Out of interest are you was this geared to any particular SoC's/
architectures?
- k
Andi Kleen
>
> What? Throw a fresh-faced newbie instantly into the tar-pit of despair
> that floppy.c is? Do you want everyone just to run screaming from
> kernel development never to be seen again?
Doing a from-scratch rewrite of floppy.c only supporting new
hardware and no obscure formats ("newfloppy.c") would be an excellent
newbie project imho. This means for someone who is still pretty
new, but wants to get their fingers wet with more complicated changes.
Then over time (old-)floppy.c could be phased out.
If anybody is interested...? (non newbies would be welcome too of course)
-Andi
Jesper Juhl
> Greg KH <gr...@kroah.com> writes:
> >
> > What? Throw a fresh-faced newbie instantly into the tar-pit of despair
> > that floppy.c is? Do you want everyone just to run screaming from
> > kernel development never to be seen again?
>
> Doing a from-scratch rewrite of floppy.c only supporting new
> hardware and no obscure formats ("newfloppy.c") would be an excellent
> newbie project imho. This means for someone who is still pretty
> new, but wants to get their fingers wet with more complicated changes.
>
> Then over time (old-)floppy.c could be phased out.
>
> If anybody is interested...? (non newbies would be welcome too of course)
>
--
Jesper Juhl <jespe...@gmail.com>
Don't top-post http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/top-post.html
Plain text mails only, please http://www.expita.com/nomime.html
Trent Waddington
> Sounds like a fun little project. I'll bite.
Let me know when you have something and I'll go buy those floppies,
test it and fix a bug or two if I find 'em.
Trent
Jesper Juhl
> On 1/31/07, Jesper Juhl <jespe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Sounds like a fun little project. I'll bite.
>
> Let me know when you have something and I'll go buy those floppies,
> test it and fix a bug or two if I find 'em.
>
--
Jesper Juhl <jespe...@gmail.com>
Don't top-post http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/top-post.html
Plain text mails only, please http://www.expita.com/nomime.html
Alan
> mode. When I rarely watch DVD I rather boot into legacy IDE kernel ...
There is a general problem with some ATAPI devices and the probe logic
currently. The old IDE code has some workarounds that the new libata
layer doesn't yet do.
Alan
Nicolas Mailhot
I'd really love if the same offer was extended to GPL out-of-tree driver
trees.
There are many out-of-tree drivers (ivtv, lirc, various webcam drivers,
enhanced USB keyboard handlers...) with merging not planified or taking
ages.
The associated hardware is useful enough someone wrote a driver.
There is "documentation" in the form of a working driver.
Sometimes there are already many FLOSS apps writen that depend on them.
Yet they languish out-of-tree, effectively sterilizing alternative efforts
just because people know they exist. Someone wrote an howto on how to plug
them in an ancient kernel, and that's good enough to remove a lot of the
merging incentive.
The common wisdom seems to be their authors will hammer LKML hard enough
the driver will eventually be merged. But these authors:
- get set in their ways like any human being
- usually put new features first and merging last
- may have decided merging was too much work
- may be struggling to do it alone
- may have asked LKML about merging once, got ignored/refused (for good,
bad, or obsolete reasons), and decided to spend their time on more
constructive work
So there are many reasons why merging will not happen as things stand.
These drivers are in many ways every bit as harmful as closed binary blobs
(making users miserable, killing alternatives, being a major reason old
kernel binaries get used long after security problems were identified and
fixed, etc). Merging/reworking them is easier than starting from
incomplete NDAed documentation. If (as this offer implies) there are good
driver authors waiting to do more drivering, why aren't those a priority?
As a side effect, cleaning up our own GPL community mess would help
convince hardware manufacturers working within the main kernel is the
right workable solution.
Regards,
--
Nicolas Mailhot
David Hollis
>
> I think this is a quite fair criticism, and I would love to see
> someone
> step up and help with this sort of organization.
>
> For example, I didn't know that XGI graphics specs were available at
> all, otherwise it might have been something fun to tackle
Just to pony up my experience in all of this, which I think is probably
quite representative of many other drivers:
A bunch of years ago I picked up a USB Ethernet device at the store
because it seemed really cool and I hoped it worked under Linux. Turns
out that it didn't. I had never written a kernel driver before, and
dealing with USB was an alien concept to me. I searched around and
found that FreeBSD had a driver and I tried to use that in combination
with other USB Ethernet drivers in the kernel as reference to get
something working. There was a basic spec sheet from the vendor, but a
lot of detail was missing and for someone who was new to spec sheets and
such, it wasn't much of a source. I wound up coming across a driver
that Tivo had written for the device so I started working to hammer that
into shape to be added to the kernel. The driver was quite a mess and
had a lot of issues and took a good amount of work, but eventually I was
able to get it to give me basic operation. As I published updates and
such, I found that there were a lot of folks that were wanting these
devices to work.
I eventually was contacted by the manufacturer to add support to their
newer chips and they even provided some code to make the devices work.
The code was not suitable for inclusion because it was circuitous,
spaghetti, impossible to understand, brute-force style code that just
could not be maintained (which I think is quite common with vendor
drivers, and really makes me shudder when I think of what the code
behind many Windows drivers must look like). I kept hammering on the
code to get it to be understandable and modular and got it sent
upstream. For one of the chips, it wound up taking a lot longer than I
had hoped, mainly due to a lack of time on my end and lack of interest
from the community - I wasn't seeing much of a 'Hey, can we get this
chip working?' so it seemed that the devices weren't out there in many
hands.
At this point, the driver supports 19 devices and seems to work quite
well on x86 and x86_64, but big-endian systems seem to show some issues
which are being worked out. The endian-issues drive me mad since I
don't have access to any big-endian systems and have little experience
with it but I'm determined to get them resolved. For a vendor, they
likely would care less if it doesn't work on big-endian. If it works on
Windows, that's all that matters.
The driver has been upstream for 3+ years or so and is included in all
distros that I'm aware of so for most people, they can go out to
BestBuy, buy the device and plug it into their Linux box and it just
works, and that is what we all want in the end.
Conversely, I've seen many cases of drivers that are developed by the
community, but kept out-of-kernel forever due to various reasons. Some
of them are due to the code quality and the developers not accepting the
feedback to get the drivers into shape to be 'kernel worthy', sometimes
it seems to be a lack of interest from the developers to merge upstream.
Maybe because they think they would lose control or something?
Sometimes it may just be that they don't realize that they can do that.
Thankfully, these tend to be somewhat fringe devices though all would
benefit at their being upstream to make everyones lives easier.
--
David Hollis <dho...@davehollis.com>
Martin Seidl
hasn't done a driver before?
either way I'd like to be somewhat involved in the process so I see how
things are done.
--martin
Eric Sandeen
> Roland Dreier wrote:
>> And I seem to recall there's more SATA chipset documentation than Jeff
>> Garzik has time to implement support for.
>
> I seriously doubt you can come up with even a single concrete example here.
Not trying to slight Jeff here in any way, but I thought I'd point out
one driver-less SATA chip that seems to have docs available.
When looking for a sata controller I came across several inexpensive
ones based on an Initio chipset, and at first glance it seems that they
have docs out there*: http://www.initio.com/products/sata.htm
but no drivers yet. Just in case anyone is interested :)
-Eric
*knowing next to nothing about SATA, I have no idea if these docs are
sufficient.
Jeff Garzik
> Jeff Garzik wrote:
>> Roland Dreier wrote:
>>> And I seem to recall there's more SATA chipset documentation than Jeff
>>> Garzik has time to implement support for.
>> I seriously doubt you can come up with even a single concrete example here.
>
> Not trying to slight Jeff here in any way, but I thought I'd point out
> one driver-less SATA chip that seems to have docs available.
>
> When looking for a sata controller I came across several inexpensive
> ones based on an Initio chipset, and at first glance it seems that they
> have docs out there*: http://www.initio.com/products/sata.htm
>
> but no drivers yet. Just in case anyone is interested :)
The driver is in libata-dev.git#upstream and queued for 2.6.21.
Jeff
Eric Sandeen
> Eric Sandeen wrote:
>> Jeff Garzik wrote:
>>> Roland Dreier wrote:
>>>> And I seem to recall there's more SATA chipset documentation than Jeff
>>>> Garzik has time to implement support for.
>>> I seriously doubt you can come up with even a single concrete example here.
>> Not trying to slight Jeff here in any way, but I thought I'd point out
>> one driver-less SATA chip that seems to have docs available.
>>
>> When looking for a sata controller I came across several inexpensive
>> ones based on an Initio chipset, and at first glance it seems that they
>> have docs out there*: http://www.initio.com/products/sata.htm
>>
>> but no drivers yet. Just in case anyone is interested :)
>
> The driver is in libata-dev.git#upstream and queued for 2.6.21.
>
> Jeff
Woo! that was fast. Ok I stand corrected. :)
-Eric
Alan
> ones based on an Initio chipset, and at first glance it seems that they
> have docs out there*: http://www.initio.com/products/sata.htm
>
> but no drivers yet. Just in case anyone is interested :)
2.6.20-mm, although it can't do some things currently and the docs are
not really adequate.
Adrian Bunk
> Greg KH <gr...@kroah.com> writes:
> >
> > What? Throw a fresh-faced newbie instantly into the tar-pit of despair
> > that floppy.c is? Do you want everyone just to run screaming from
> > kernel development never to be seen again?
>
> Doing a from-scratch rewrite of floppy.c only supporting new
> hardware and no obscure formats ("newfloppy.c") would be an excellent
> newbie project imho. This means for someone who is still pretty
> new, but wants to get their fingers wet with more complicated changes.
>
> Then over time (old-)floppy.c could be phased out.
Considering how widespread floppies are, these two sentences are
contradictions.
If the goal is to phase out the old floppy driver, a new driver will
have to gain support for more or less all hardware the old driver
supports...
> -Andi
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
-
Sergei Organov
[...]
>> And there are plenty of documented devices that no one cares enough
>> about to submit a driver for.
>
> Any specific examples? I have a long list of people who wish to write
> new drivers but just don't know which hardware is not yet supported.
Maybe not entirely a new driver, as there already exist out-of-kernel
vendor GPL driver, but if somebody is willing to resolve the issue
described here:
<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.serial/1221>
please contact me, and I'll be willing to help in testing as I have the
hardware.
-- Sergei.
Jan Engelhardt
On Jan 30 2007 14:00, Roland Dreier wrote:
>
>An uncharitable vendor might decide it's not worth publishing specs,
>since the Linux guys can reverse engineer the Windows driver just as
>fast anyway.
And ndiswrapper gives fire to just releasing the Windows one :(
Jan
--
Jeff Garzik
> On Jan 30 2007 14:00, Roland Dreier wrote:
>> An uncharitable vendor might decide it's not worth publishing specs,
>> since the Linux guys can reverse engineer the Windows driver just as
>> fast anyway.
>
> And ndiswrapper gives fire to just releasing the Windows one :(
Logically this makes sense from a user perspective, but I tend to doubt
ndiswrapper is really a motivator for a vendor? One would think that
vendors would rather not have a crash-y solution for their hardware.
Jeff
Jan Engelhardt
On Jan 31 2007 08:34, David Hollis wrote:
>Conversely, I've seen many cases of drivers that are developed by the
>community, but kept out-of-kernel forever due to various reasons. Some
>of them are due to the code quality and the developers not accepting the
>feedback to get the drivers into shape to be 'kernel worthy', sometimes
>it seems to be a lack of interest from the developers to merge upstream.
>Maybe because they think they would lose control or something?
Putting the "codingstyle" control aside, often it's because things look
too hackish. Take ipt_ROUTE as an example. It won't get included, since
the "proper" way to do it would be using MARK and iproute2. But many users
don't get that [no criticism here], because ipt_ROUTE is so much easier.
(Probably because iproute2 and other netlink-using tools, like tc, lack
thorough documentation.)
Jan
--
ft: http://freshmeat.net/p/chaostables/
alan
>
> On Jan 30 2007 14:00, Roland Dreier wrote:
>>
>> An uncharitable vendor might decide it's not worth publishing specs,
>> since the Linux guys can reverse engineer the Windows driver just as
>> fast anyway.
>
> And ndiswrapper gives fire to just releasing the Windows one :(
ndiswrapper is a way to make it work "now" as opposed to "correct". There
is a lot that you cannot do with ndiswrapper that a proper driver can.
--
"Invoking the supernatural can explain anything, and hence explains nothing."
- University of Utah bioengineering professor Gregory Clark
Jan Engelhardt
On Jan 31 2007 18:24, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 11:08:14AM +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:
>> Greg KH <gr...@kroah.com> writes:
>> >
>> > What? Throw a fresh-faced newbie instantly into the tar-pit of despair
>> > that floppy.c is? Do you want everyone just to run screaming from
>> > kernel development never to be seen again?
>>
>> Doing a from-scratch rewrite of floppy.c only supporting new
>> hardware and no obscure formats ("newfloppy.c") would be an excellent
>> newbie project imho. This means for someone who is still pretty
>> new, but wants to get their fingers wet with more complicated changes.
>>
>> Then over time (old-)floppy.c could be phased out.
>>...
>
>Considering how widespread floppies are, these two sentences are
>contradictions.
>
>If the goal is to phase out the old floppy driver, a new driver will
>have to gain support for more or less all hardware the old driver
>supports...
How much different hardware does the (old)floppy.c do? I imagine that
today, where floppies phase out, there will be, in descending order:
* USB floppy drives (atm handled by sd.c, could be better to have sf.c)
* FDCs on mainboards
* 1.44M drives
* 1.2M drives
Even a working 2.88M, as cool as it sounds, never landed in my hands ever
since I've been into computing. Perhaps the oldest, smallest disk I once
had was a 360K 5.25", but the B floppy drive to read it was already
multi-compliant that read up to 1.2M disks.
Jan
--
ft: http://freshmeat.net/p/chaostables/
Jan Engelhardt
On Jan 31 2007 09:58, alan wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Jan 2007, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>> On Jan 30 2007 14:00, Roland Dreier wrote:
>> >
>> > An uncharitable vendor might decide it's not worth publishing specs,
>> > since the Linux guys can reverse engineer the Windows driver just as
>> > fast anyway.
>>
>> And ndiswrapper gives fire to just releasing the Windows one :(
>
> ndiswrapper is a way to make it work "now" as opposed to "correct".
> There is a lot that you cannot do with ndiswrapper that a proper driver
> can.
The fear is that a vendor might not open things because it works
"reasonably enough" (for them as well as the enduser) at "this time".
E.g. I got sis162u.inf for some usb wireless adapter, it works
enough, but of course I am not too happy with the binary blob because
it might have some not-so-"correct" core that could silently oops me
away.
Jan
--
Andrey Borzenkov
Hash: SHA1
On Wednesday 31 January 2007 15:49, Alan wrote:
> > Well, I have a long standing issue with pata_ali not detecting CD-ROM in
> > DMA mode. When I rarely watch DVD I rather boot into legacy IDE kernel
> > ...
>
> There is a general problem with some ATAPI devices and the probe logic
> currently. The old IDE code has some workarounds that the new libata
> layer doesn't yet do.
>
OK I hope to get chance to test new code someday ...
- -andrey
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Bob Copeland
> too hackish.
Also sometimes the authors know it's hackish, or just don't expect it
to be generally useful to the world. I happen to own an out-of-tree
filesystem which I have little desire to have reviewed for mainline:
only a dozen people use it at most, and I know it would get pinged
mercilessly for using buffer heads and general insanity if it ever
made it past "use FUSE instead" (which would admittedly be a perfectly
fine response). It works though, so I keep it up to date with the VFS
changes.
I do have some interest in working on various device drivers, though.
Greg, assuming this somehow kicks off some avalanche of specs, will
there be a ML for hooking up driver writers with specs and willing
users?
--
Bob Copeland %% www.bobcopeland.com
Lennart Sorensen
> How much different hardware does the (old)floppy.c do? I imagine that
> today, where floppies phase out, there will be, in descending order:
>
> * USB floppy drives (atm handled by sd.c, could be better to have sf.c)
> * FDCs on mainboards
> * 1.44M drives
> * 1.2M drives
>
> Even a working 2.88M, as cool as it sounds, never landed in my hands ever
> since I've been into computing. Perhaps the oldest, smallest disk I once
> had was a 360K 5.25", but the B floppy drive to read it was already
> multi-compliant that read up to 1.2M disks.
So what is wrong with the current floppy driver (other than being 120k
of code apparently)?
As for floppies that should work, well I imagine on x86 that would have
to be 360k and 1200k 5-1/4", and 720k, 1200k and 1440k 3-1/2". Would
perhaps be nice to still support 160, 180 and 320k on the 5-1/4" drive
too just in case anyone ever wants to read one. Of course some people
might also want support for the higher capacity formats on the 1440k
drive. 2880k would perhaps be nice too for those few people that have
one (I have only ever seen them on decstations, where I haven't seen any
driver ever), and I think a few IBMs. I have never seen a 2880k disk.
In non x86 land, I would think there is a seperate floppy driver given
the odd formats of some of those systems.
--
Len Sorensen