It is a contest? [LWN.net]

It is a contest?

Posted Oct 22, 2010 17:14 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: It is a contest? by khim
Parent article: How not to recognize free hardware

Doesn't it feel like this is happening more & more?

I admit I don't have hard figures, and I'm not sure how I'd get them, but my strong feeling is that things have been getting progressively better.

That is to say, more of the hardware the OS actually cares about is class compliant rather than requiring custom drivers.

There are big holdouts. Networking for example, Ethernet cards are hot on compliance with a well documented standard right up until you reach the controller chip, I guess all the standard-friendly people at network peripheral companies work over on the link-layer side of the operation.

But on the whole I can't think of any category where things are less class-based than they were in say 1995, and many where things are more so.

I thought we'd missed a trick twice with USB, firstly sound (but today everything is either USB Audio or HDA on PCI) and then webcams (but the USB video spec didn't die, it was just a long pregnancy and today you can walk into any store and buy webcams you've never heard of that work in Linux)

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You are correct - that's how things are going...

Posted Oct 24, 2010 20:06 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

That is to say, more of the hardware the OS actually cares about is class compliant rather than requiring custom drivers.

Well, the situation is simple: most "hardware" devices nowadays include sizable software components (firmwares for things things like HDD today are bigger then whole Unix systems were 30 years back), so when it's known what the device should do and how it should work they eventually comply to the spec.

But it does not make the suggested mark valuable! In first stage when new wave of the devices are introduced it's pointless because it's sheer insanity to tie release dates for the "hot new stuff" to release dates of kernel and later when majority of the devices are produced by the most famous brand ever called "Noname" there are noone who will care enough to bother to test compliance - but it does not really matter because stuff works out of the box!

But on the whole I can't think of any category where things are less class-based than they were in say 1995, and many where things are more so.

Any category which existed back then is "old news" today - so of course the majority of the devices reached "driver for class" stage. But new categories and subcategories are different. Compare situation with mices (some still require drivers to enable full functionality, but for majority there are not need for driver at all) and multitouch-enabled touchpads.