Popular third party drivers [LWN.net]

Popular third party drivers

Posted Apr 8, 2008 12:14 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263)
In reply to: Popular third party drivers by rahulsundaram
Parent article: A Linux Driver Project status report

>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 :-)

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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, just rpm -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.