Cross-platform drivers

Posted Aug 31, 2011 15:54 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: Cross-platform drivers by mjthayer
Parent article: Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later

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.