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Popular third party driversPopular third party driversPosted Apr 8, 2008 7:21 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)Parent article: A Linux Driver Project status report
I am wondering about the prospect of cleaning up and merging widely used third party drivers such as http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html as part of the Linux Drivers project. I dropped a mail to Greg KH a while back and didn't get a response on that. This is pretty important to Fedora atleast since we don't have additional kernel module packages anymore. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/200...
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Popular third party drivers Posted Apr 8, 2008 7:31 UTC (Tue) by gregkh (subscriber, #8) [Link] I'm sorry if I missed your email, I searched my archives and could not find it anywhere :( Anyway, yes, we are working to bring drivers that are out of the tree into the main kernel tree. Look at the large patches that are currently in our quilt/git tree. It contains a number of drivers just like this. Please feel free to send me a pointer to the latest version of the driver that you wish to see in the tree in email, as long as the original developer of the driver does not object to it being added (we try to not go against the wishes of the authors.)
Popular third party drivers Posted Apr 8, 2008 22:45 UTC (Tue) by davidw (subscriber, #947) [Link] Speaking of which, I thought I'd sent you something about collaborating/integrating/seeing what's possible with the Linux Incompatibility List (at leenooks.com ), which I run, but can't seem to find that email, so maybe I never asked. The scope is quite similar, although I'm liable to include things that are very difficult for ordinary people to actually use, or things that have a driver that's not there 100%. I don't run the site for profit (the adsense covers hosting costs), and to tell the truth wouldn't mind unloading it to the right person.
SPCA Posted Apr 8, 2008 9:44 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] Half a year ago the SPCA driver came up on KernelTrap, when I asked about it in the comments of a story on out-of-tree modules. See the comments in the story at http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Out_of_Tree_Modules. It seems the problem here is a style issue, or one of architecture (to put it more grandly), and thus more intractable than one involving merely missing specs. :-( <- the face of a sad webcam owner.
Popular third party drivers Posted Apr 8, 2008 12:14 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link] >This is pretty important to Fedora atleast since we don't have additional kernel module packages anymore. Sweet, that gives distros with kmods an edge :-)
Popular third party drivers Posted Apr 8, 2008 12:57 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] Technically, the patches can be just be in a single kernel package instead of kmod's but the whole point of that exercise it to support upstream better. While distros can ignore the upstream aspect of it, that is generally a short term win. Getting these drivers upstream benefits everybody. Distros shouldn't try to get an edge on such matters IMO.
Popular third party drivers Posted Apr 8, 2008 13:19 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link] Putting all modules as a patch into the main kernel.src.rpm is just going to be a hassle if that is even legally possible. kmods seemed to have been welcomed by hardware vendors, as they could ship a simple one-command installable package (e.g. ati/nvidia rpms for suse, justrpm -Uhv); I am sure people were happy to have such a package; now with kmods going away they are back to square¹ with the ugly .sh installers.
Popular third party drivers Posted Apr 8, 2008 13:21 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link] Oh right, here's a good example the ivtv package from SUSE. Has no .src.rpm, so I guess there is even more surrounding legalese than with the NVIDIA license if there is not even a .src.rpm. Now, how would you get ivtv into the single kernel package...
Popular third party drivers Posted Apr 8, 2008 15:41 UTC (Tue) by Thalience (subscriber, #4217) [Link] FYI, the ivtv kernel driver was merged in 2.6.22. Not sure what might be in the SUSE ivtv package. Perhaps the firmware (would explain the lack of a .src.rpm)?
Popular third party drivers Posted Apr 9, 2008 1:28 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Yes. I would think it was firmware. I have one of those cards and they do require separate firmware, but the driver is now in-kernel.
Popular third party drivers Posted Apr 8, 2008 16:39 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] Read the link before jumping to conclusions. Kmod's are only going away in the official repository which was only including free and open source code anyway and hence for proprietary drivers the Fedora change makes no difference. Third party repositories like Livna continue to provide such drivers as kmod or dkms packages and there is no need for shell script installers.
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