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KS2008: When should drivers be merged?KS2008: When should drivers be merged?Posted Sep 17, 2008 17:10 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)In reply to: KS2008: When should drivers be merged? by sbergman27 Parent article: KS2008: When should drivers be merged?
There's the sort of fundamental problem that vendors don't want to announce unreleased hardware, let alone publish drivers for it, and then they obsolete the hardware sooner than the latency in keeping a kernel release into users' hands. They're doing their release cycle based on the idea that they'll ship drivers, which they write internally and which don't have to be maintainable (i.e., only have to work with one or two already-released OS versions), with their hardware.
The solution is probably for them to design hardware that functions okay with drivers that aren't specifically for that hardware release, such that Linux users get hardware that works fine today and performs better over time (as newer drivers notice more hardware features and use them).
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KS2008: When should drivers be merged? Posted Sep 17, 2008 19:53 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
Perhaps this would be a case to ship the vendor's drivers "until something better is available", probably disabled by default in the main kernel tree. Or alternatively, to have a private mailing list with relevant kernel drivers that they can submit to, so that their code will not be made public before they are ready.
KS2008: When should drivers be merged? Posted Sep 17, 2008 22:16 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
Releasing vendor drivers wouldn't really help much, since it's pretty late by the time users get anything released by the kernel team. Getting drivers for pre-release hardware to kernel reviewers under NDA could be a big help, though, particularly if that included distro representatives who could get a package for the module through QA and ready to release simultaneously with the hardware. I wonder if big hardware vendors would be interested in the linux driver project that Greg KH runs, for the express purpose of collecting acks from reviewers (and, of course, comments, but those would presumably be uninteresting before they could be posted) in advance of the code going out to the world.
KS2008: When should drivers be merged? Posted Sep 19, 2008 1:27 UTC (Fri) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
IIRC it's common for (clueful) vendors to provide docs under NDA with the actual release embargoed until the hardware is announced. Or there are weird tricks, like drivers landing in the mainline kernel under code names, and then when the press release goes out so does the rename-all-the-symbols-in-that-driver patch.
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