What about vendors? [LWN.net]

What about vendors?

Posted Dec 15, 2005 15:55 UTC (Thu) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029)
In reply to: What about vendors? by tclark
Parent article: "Just works with Linux"

What we *need* is to be very clear with vendors about our requirements. If you're buying a Linux-installed system, and you want only open-source drivers, you need to tell the vendor exactly that. Make it crystal clear. Tell them, "If, when I receive this system, I determine that any of the hardware is using proprietary or other than non-free drivers, I will return the system and demand my money back." They can make all the claims they like (well, not *all*), and if they ship something that's not completely free, they can excuse themselves by citing the lack of technical knowledge on the part of the salesperson. Vendors will get away with this for as long as we let them.

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What about vendors?

Posted Dec 15, 2005 16:55 UTC (Thu) by tlw (subscriber, #31237) [Link]

Agreed. It's too easy for a vendor to write "works with Linux", but that's not specific enough. "Works with Linux" should be defined to mean:

specifications are available
driver is open-source
driver is integrated into the kernel.org kernel

It's happened to me before where I'll obtain a device, it comes with a CD with source code (great!)... for kernel 2.2.20 and 2.4.9. It would be nice if "works with Linux" were a shorthand form of saying "we work with the Linux community".

What about vendors?

Posted Dec 19, 2005 7:28 UTC (Mon) by rakoenig (subscriber, #29855) [Link]

"driver is integrated into the kernel.org kernel"

Ok. I'm working at a vendor and my job is to make sure that Linux is running on our PCs.

Your statement is nice, but I can tell you what we're currently going through:

Launched a PC with a new southbridge. That caused problems because it wasn't supported in the kernel, so Linux was unable to "see" the SATA drives. We did a lot of effort to fix this issue and since 2.6.14 the driver is in the vanilla kernel.

But that actually doesn't have much impact on our customers: All the current distributions (RHEL, SLES, Debian, Fedora Core 4, SUSE Linux 1O...) are shipped with a kernel that is less than 2.6.14. The result is that if a customer tries to install he runs into the problem that his installation program will report that there are no hard drives!

So fixing issues on kernel.org kernels is just the half work. The other half must be done by the distributors. And since this is an issue that affects installation it leads to the need of new installation media, that makes the issue more complicated. It would be easy to do a kernel update online, but as long as you're unable to create a running system from your
installation media you're probably not happy.

Well, for that issue there is light on the horizon: Fedora Core 5 Test 1 has the fix, so is with openSUSE 10.1 alpha. SLES 10 will ship with it and Red Hat promised to have the patch in Update 3 of RHEL4. So soon the situation will get much better for the customers.

But "driver is integrated into the kernel.org kernel" is not enough.

One solution could be hardware certification, but unfortunately there are not much certification programs around. And a RHEL4 certification won't imply that the machine is running fine with Debian/Sarge.

What about vendors?

Posted Dec 19, 2005 14:58 UTC (Mon) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]

it's true that getting the hardware to work with the kernel.org kernel doesn't instantyly make it work with all distros, however once or twice a year (sometimes more) the distros update their kernel from kernel.org. (this is one of the reasons for the 2.6 development model, to allow the distros to sync up more frequently and reduce the lag (and divergance) between the different kernels.

What about vendors?

Posted Dec 21, 2005 9:26 UTC (Wed) by wilck (subscriber, #29844) [Link]

once or twice a year (sometimes more) the distros update their kernel from kernel.org

This isn't true for the enterprise distros. They stick to the same base kernel for years, just backporting new drivers as they see need.