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OMFS and the value of obscure filesystems

Posted Apr 18, 2008 2:26 UTC (Fri) by pj (subscriber, #4506)
In reply to: OMFS and the value of obscure filesystems by dale77
Parent article: OMFS and the value of obscure filesystems

It's hard to justify not bringing in OMFS when I know for a fact that there's  code for
prototype hardware boards *that never saw production* in the mainline.  Code for which there
were under 6 boards made. ever. Suddenly 20 guys using OMFS sounds like quite the crowd!

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Hardware driver bias

Posted Apr 18, 2008 9:43 UTC (Fri) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

I don't see the difference between a file system driver for obscure hardware and a chip driver
for obscure hardware.   They've been hyping how easy it is to get a well-enough-written chip
driver into the kernel.  Resistance here appears to sully that message.  

That said, there seems to be a lot of effort to divert USB hardware drivers to user-space
libraries, which is probably all to the good. I suppose the difference is that FUSE is not the
standard installation that USB libraries and the generic drivers they depend upon are.  Fixing
that is a job for the distributions.

USB drivers to userspace

Posted Aug 3, 2008 10:20 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

That move does exist, but only for devices with no concurrent uses and no established kernel
interface -- scanners, for example.

It's not limited to USB either; the Firewire DV driver was likewise deprecated.