The hardware vendors' panel

Posted Jul 20, 2005 3:06 UTC (Wed) by jwb (guest, #15467)
Parent article: Kernel Summit 2005: The hardware vendors' panel

What kind of crack is the Intel guy on? I've never heard someone say "wow I would love to run Linux, but until it has certified drivers, I'm not touching it." If anything, people prefer drivers in the mainline, even ones that came from random unknown hackers, to the trash that comes from most manufacturers.

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The hardware vendors' panel

Posted Jul 20, 2005 4:24 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (2 responses)

I suspect that most people who buy stuff directly from Intel (i.e., Intel's actual customers) care about certified drivers, while others tend not to. So few users care, but those who do are important contracts for Intel.

It seems to me like the right way for them to do things is to have a driver in the mainline that other people patch as needed, and keep their own version in their own repository that they certify. Then users who care about certification can get the driver from Intel, while others can get it from the mainline.

Intel certified drivers

Posted Jul 22, 2005 0:29 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

What I don't get is why does an Intel customer need Intel to certify a device driver, but none of the rest of the system? In the kernel alone, more than half the code that has to work right for the customer to successfully exploit the Intel product is not part of the driver in question. Who certifies the rest of Linux? It's always been my impression that using Linux and getting performance guarantees are dichotomous.

So I agree that what a company in Intel's position should do is simply design to and test with a particular entire system configuration (driver, kernel, middleware, applications, ...) and advertise those particular test results and leave the customer to do what he always does with Linux -- try to stick close to that configuration, and assume the risk of breakage.

Intel certified drivers

Posted Jul 22, 2005 10:08 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

PHB syndrome kicks in; their Dell laptop is an Intel Centrino laptop, which implies that Intel makes most of the hardware in it. Everyone knows that hardware is much more important than software, since it's so easy to copy software, yet very hard to copy hardware. Therefore, only device drivers matter, since the rest of the kernel doesn't do anything with the hardware.

You and I know that this is a completely wrong assessment of the situation, but it's how PHBs are prone to thinking.

The hardware vendors' panel

Posted Jul 20, 2005 4:43 UTC (Wed) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]

If you've never heard that said then you've never read a corporate PC buying contract. It's how corporate buyers ensure that the PC they buy fully interoperates with the operating system chosen by the IT Department.

That Intel are seeing this request is good. It means that some IT Departments have asked their buyers to ensure that Linux runs on the notebooks they buy.

The hardware vendors' panel

Posted Jul 22, 2005 8:08 UTC (Fri) by bronson (guest, #4806) [Link]

jwb, apparently you work in a small company? The PHBs that I know ask for "XYZ Certification" all the time. Certification is mostly meaningless, of course, since modern computers are so incredibly complex. But they don't understand that. And they control the purse strings.

That said, I don't see that there's much of a problem here.. Intel can simply say, "the zqfmgb driver in Linux 2.6.14 is Intel Certified." True, they'll have to certify a new kernel release every 4 months or so. That should be trivial unless their driver is undergoing serious code churn.