Cross-platform drivers [LWN.net]

Cross-platform drivers

Posted Aug 31, 2011 8:30 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
In reply to: Worth a read by rahvin
Parent article: Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later

> I'd wager that comment alone killed any chance of the driver ever being accepted. As you said, similar comments by other companies in the past got their code blackballed.

Warning: the following complaining is going to be slightly off-topic. This brings back memories of another recent LWN article [1]. And it makes me feel, once again, that the kernel community are a bit too unforgiving or inflexible in their insistence on things being done exactly their way. Of course I understand and sympathise with their arguments that they can avoid lots of unnecessary duplication between drivers for different hardware, as avoiding duplication generally raises software quality (while lowering costs). But sharing driver code between different operating systems is also avoiding duplication, and I think that if the kernel community wanted to they could help vendors produce drivers which go some way towards achieving both. Or is there a feeling that this is giving unneeded (since the community has the resources to manage without vendor drivers) help to the competition?

I must note that I am somewhat biased as I work among other things on the cross-platform driver code of the VirtualBox Guest Additions (which we are not likely to try to get upstream in the foreseeable future).

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/454716/

to post comments

Cross-platform drivers

Posted Aug 31, 2011 12:19 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link] (3 responses)

You just have to consider that the work load considered by kernel hackers is their burden, if lightening theirs means others have to work more, so be it.

Cross-platform drivers

Posted Aug 31, 2011 13:01 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (2 responses)

> You just have to consider that the work load considered by kernel hackers is their burden, if lightening theirs means others have to work more, so be it.

Certainly, but does sharing code (in a sensible way of course) with other platforms make that burden heavier?

Cross-platform drivers

Posted Sep 1, 2011 21:08 UTC (Thu) by mlankhorst (subscriber, #52260) [Link] (1 responses)

I'd like to point you to an article 2 weeks ago in lwn

https://lwn.net/Articles/454716

Cross-platform drivers

Posted Sep 2, 2011 8:12 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> I'd like to point you to an article 2 weeks ago in lwn

I actually quoted that myself a couple of posts up this thread!

Cross-platform drivers

Posted Aug 31, 2011 15:54 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

I haven't seen Linux developers worry about helping the competition (with one notable Reiser exception). This might be partly GPLv2 smugness ("go ahead, I'll just poach your changes when you release them") but I think it's just focusing on what's important. Rather than crying about calling something Linux/Android or aligning marketing messages, kernel devs just keep improving their piece of the universe.

As for the Broadcom driver, who wants to maintain another 4 files of useless shims? Or merge a do-nothing patch that contains changes needed by the Win32 ARM driver? Or try to navigate a mess of invisible dependencies known only to Broadcom devs? That would be madness.

So, I think the reservations of the kernel devs are 100% practical. They're just maximizing the maintainability of the Linux driver.

If Broadcom wants to release the source to all their other drivers too, then I expect the Linux kernel crew would be willing to talk about code duplication. Until then, they can only work with what they know.