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"We want more drivers, no matter how 'obscure' [...]""We want more drivers, no matter how 'obscure' [...]"Posted Apr 21, 2007 12:52 UTC (Sat) by farnz (guest, #17727)In reply to: "We want more drivers, no matter how 'obscure' [...]" by filker0 Parent article: ELC: The embedded Linux nightmare And, unfortunately, your employer missed the gain from mainstreaming the drivers. The community obviously can't test the drivers for you, but there have been changes to the kernel that might result in your drivers needing janitorial-grade changes (the change of the argument list for interrupt handlers, as one example - LWN maintains a list of changes). These changes will be made by the community for you if the driver is mainstreamed. While the changes will only be compile tested, if your employer decides to make the jump from 2.6.10 to 2.6.20 (for example), they'll find that the drivers at least compile, and don't break the kernel. This reduces the porting load; instead of having to find out what's changed, update your drivers, get them building, test them and debug them, you're down to just testing the drivers, and debugging them as needeed. Further, you can use git to look at what's been done to your drivers, and thus have a good chance of spotting cases where someone's misunderstood what the hardware does as they clean up the drive. It's a difficult way of thinking to come to from a proprietary world; what other "upstreams" will maintain code they cannot test in a building and theoretically working fashion?
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