Worth a read [LWN.net]

Worth a read

Posted Aug 31, 2011 23:21 UTC (Wed) by Julie (guest, #66693)
In reply to: Worth a read by TommyAtkins
Parent article: Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later

How would anyone other than ARM know that?

Would ARM actually know this? Don't they just sell IP cores to SoC developers/vendors? I thought kernel contributions were the Soc/platform vendors' responsibility after that. Isn't that part of the problem with code duplication - that they don't like to admit that rival vendors exist (or at least their PR departments don't)?

(I'm sure that there was a Thomas Gleixner article about this not too long ago but I can't find it now in the archives or remember the heading - if anyone has the link that would be great.)

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Worth a read

Posted Sep 9, 2011 14:44 UTC (Fri) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link]

Quite. Arm sell designs, 2nd parties use those to make chip designs, and 3rd parties then use _those_ to make platforms. So ARM itself has no real handle on how many actual board designs/platforms there are out there or what software is running on them. It does get data on chip shipments so royalties can be paid, but that's the closest it gets to knowing what's being done.

And yes - this diversity and the independence of downstream companies/devs is a big part of the reason for the code duplication in the kernel. Organisations like Linaro are doing their best to re-centralise/co-ordinate and share the actual development precisely because the downstream widget-makers and SOC vendors have done such a poor job of upstreaming and not NIHing. (I quite understand why - I use to be a downstream engineer and I failed miserably to get most of my code into mainline too, even though I know perfectly well why it's a good idea).