The role of OSDL

The role of OSDL

Posted Dec 15, 2005 22:33 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
Parent article: "Just works with Linux"

> Perhaps an industry group (OSDL, say) would like to serve the community by taking this task on.

Absolutely. They employ people to write Linux, their members are hardware manufacturers and distribution makers. Basically, people with a lot of interest in getting Linux to "just work".

What they need to do is maintain a matrix of hardware that just works against vanilla kernel. What they need to allow their distributor members to do is to maintain a matrix against their own distribution (RHEL, SUSE, Debian etc.). Distributors should deprecate their own hardware compatibility lists in favour of this one. Hardware manufacturers can then work both with OSDL and distributors on the maintenance of the matrices.

Each entry should contain the level of "support" (i.e. what does and doesn't work for that hardware component/driver). People should be able to find the entries by multiple criteria, such as driver name within the kernel, chipset used on the hardware component, manufacturer name/code of the component, functions of the component etc.

All support that is based on binary drivers should be clearly marked with warning signs that link to an explaination as to why it is imporant that hardware manufacturers release their drivers under a kernel compatible licence (that kind of thing should not be a surprise at _Open_ _Source_ Development Lab). We read some good explainations recently here at LWN, prepared by kernel maintainers themselves, so that shouldn't be hard to do.

Big task by all means, but when done by so many organisations and individuals in one location, it shouldn't be impossible.

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