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Linux Kernel Devs Offer Free Driver Development
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jan 30, 2007 07:41 AM
from the Nvidia-this-means-you dept.
from the Nvidia-this-means-you dept.
schwaang writes "Linux Kernel hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman, author of Linux Kernel in a Nutshell has posted an epic announcement on his blog. This could portend increased device compatibility for Linux users, higher-quality drivers, and fewer non-free binary blobs." From the announcement: "[T]he Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development... All that is needed is some kind of specification that describes how your device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing to answer questions every once in a while. If your company is worried about NDA issues surrounding your device's specifications, we have arranged a program... in order to properly assure that all needed NDA requirements are fulfilled. Now your developers will have more time to work on drivers for all of the other operating systems out there, and you can add 'supported on Linux' to your product's marketing material."
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Free Linux Kernel Driver Development FAQ 84 comments
schwaang writes "The recent announcement by Linux Kernel Developer Greg Kroah-Hartman that 'the Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development' seems to have stirred up some interest as well as some questions — see the Slashdot discussion about the announcement. Greg K-H addresses some of the questions raised here, and raises a few more, in a new Free Linux Driver Development FAQ on his blog. An excerpt: 'Q: Are companies really going to do this? A: Yes, already we have received a number of serious queries from companies about producing Linux drivers for their devices. More information will be available later when details are firmed up."
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Developers: Update On Free Linux Driver Development 272 comments
Remember the offer Greg Kroah-Hartman made earlier this year, to get Linux drivers written for free for any company that wanted them? Now an anonymous reader points us to an article up on linuxworld with an update to this program. Greg K-H, who leads the development of several kernel subsystems including USB and PCI, admits that the January offer was a bit of "marketing hype" — but says it has brought companies and developers together anyway. Twelve companies have said "yes please," one driver is already in the kernel, and five more are in the pipeline.
[+]
Know Any Hardware Needing Better Linux Support? 518 comments
Dev Null writes "The Linux device driver project has hit something of a snag: they have lots of developers, but few devices to work on, so they're looking for input concerning which devices aren't well-supported in Linux. If any of you know of devices that could use better support, you can help out by listing them on the project's wiki."
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How many (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How many (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How many (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How many (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, working with a competitor to Microsoft may not be a wise strategic decision.
"Hi, good to see you again. I heard about how you were working with those Linux guys on giving away free drivers for your new card. That's a great move. But that has nothing to do with what I wanted to tell you, which was that there was an accident in the Vista certification lab and we lost the drivers you sent us. Until we can get a fix pushed out for this that means that everybody who buys your product from now on will be told that it has absolutely no support and that even if they download something directly from you it will be flagged as foreign code and won't run. The guys in the lab are really broken up about it and can't figure out how that kind of mistake could happen. Don't worry though, we'll get everything straightened out in the next big service pack. Honest."
Extortion (Score:5, Funny)
Like that ever stopped Microsoft before.
> I would hope the DoJ steps in at that point.
Like that ever stopped Microsoft before.
Re:How many (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies worried about IP issues should ask themselves if they are in the hardware business or the software business. If their objective is to sell more gizzmos, then opening the API to developers is an excellent way to sell more product.
If a company is concerned about the number of questions they'll be asked by the developers, then (a) they don't know the software business, and (b) they should take a long, hard look at the quality of their documentation.
The biggest problem is that many companies are already making so much from selling their gizzmos to Windows users not to need to sell them to Mac or Linux users as well, even though it takes no significant effort to do so. The extra profit, even at virtually 100% per unit) simply isn't attractive.
Users need software freedom for all their software (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe this kind of thing happens [digitalcitizen.info] more than others know, particularly as GNU/Linux distributors that distribute proprietary software make it easier for users to acquire proprietary software (as I understand Ubuntu is working on). Users shouldn't be left without their software freedom, nor should they have to choose between updating their system kernel and using their video card.
Making users helpless and keeping them separate is no way to live. Users need software freedom now.
Re:How many (Score:5, Insightful)
things I want done rather than supporting some lame hardware
vendor's attempt to save 5 cents on some bit of hardware.
Intellegence in peripherals should be expanding outwards
rather than shrinking. The former aids parallelism and the
latter sabotages it.
Re:How many (Score:4, Insightful)
If a peripheral is taxing the host CPU enough that upgrading the CPU will increase the performance on that peripheral, it's already taking up too much of the host CPUs time.
Re:With few notable exceptions... (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently not. What PP said was that there is the potential for profit there, but the hardware industry may be underestimating the buying power of the Linux desktop market.
For example, I, and many other Linux users buy my WiFi based on what works in Linux. I am not a Linux-only human; I have a Mac, a Windell at work, and a Ubuntu laptop.
But therein lay the point: The commercial OS developers already support your product; you wrote drivers for them. Now, at no extra cost, you can have the edge up on your competition for that 1.6% of the computer-using market that has Linux in one form or another. As of 2004, that's 1.6% of 61.8% of all people in the US, or about two-and-a-half million people. At median income of $30k, and assuming that 5% of their purchases are technology-oriented, that's a chunk of $3.75B you're fighting for.
Not a small number, and the slice of it you get could mean the difference between shelling out a new product in a month or shelling it out in a year. Meanwhile, if you can expand that slice at low (rather than building a monolithic driver, build drivers as modules that can be 'plugged in' to existing kernel scaffolding for Linux, Apple/Mach and NT) or no (having the Linux Devs build it) cost, there's no reason you shouldn't.
Of course, the bigger the company, the less this matters to them; large companies have the opportunity to 'rest on their laurels', as it were, when it comes to new accessibility.
Linux a Viable Alternative? (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, don't get me wrong, I think Linux is sexy. But not that sexy.
seems like a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:seems like a good idea (Score:5, Interesting)
To me it seems more like an initiative to figure out which companies use "we don't have the staff/resources for an open driver" to keep their drivers proprietary.
Re:seems like a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Another way of looking at it would be as formalising the rule that "if you give us specifications, the driver will get written". A lot of the problems with free software drivers is lack of information on how a device works; if this makes it better known that all they have to do is provide some specification, it might encourage companies to submit more of them, and encourage customers to ask people to submit more of them.
Re:seems like a good idea (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a mixture of worries about revealing possible Patent infringements, trying to slavishly follow the lawyer's advice, and a confusion as to what business they are precisely in (Software versus hardware- a lot of companies, because of the advice of their IP lawyers are confused as to what they should be doing...).
Re:seems like a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
It might give the device manufacturers an out but, more importantly, won't it equally give the Linux family an 'in'?
The point isn't, so far as I can see, to make any profit from the scheme other than to spread the word of Linux and increase the potential compatibilities/reduce the incompatibilities.
Plus, as a bonus for the device driver writers, it's an impressive CV when you consider the varieties of hardware that are supported by the various Linux distros and the work, and potential elegance, that goes into solving the various demands.
It seems win-win for everyone, really. And a good, and generous, idea.
Re:seems like a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
The point isn't, so far as I can see, to make any profit from the scheme other than to spread the word of Linux and increase the potential compatibilities/reduce the incompatibilities.
In fact, this is how it's always worked --- people have been asking companies for device information for years. (I did, once; I wanted the specs for a SIM reader device so I could do a Linux driver. Did I get a response? Did I hell.) The only difference is that this announcement rephrases things in a rather more marketspeak and official manner. Instead of the companies doing us a favour, by providing hardware specs, we are now doing them a favour, by writing their drivers for them.
It's a rather neat bit of lateral thinking.
Re:seems like a good idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly! I think Greg made a tongue-in-cheek post on his blog and the submitter and /. editor unwittingly took it at face value (no big surprise there). It will be wonderful/funny if some corporate shills also take the blog post at face value and actually start feeding the kernel developers the information they need.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd say that's pretty much the state of play for the majority of Linux drivers anyway. To be fair I h
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://hplip.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Re:seems like a good idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Hardware ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hardware ? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hardware ? (Score:4, Funny)
Dedicated (Score:5, Insightful)
Peter
Quick Scan (Score:4, Interesting)
Example of extending to other platform (Score:5, Informative)
After the company collapsed, users were left with no drivers for recent windows version (XP, XP64 and Vista).
But, the Linux drivers happened to be open source.
So most of the work you may see on websites like http://3dfxzone.it/ [3dfxzone.it] for Windows, is mostly based on libglide and Mesa3d for linux.
(This is also another proof that open-source enable something to survive beyond the death of it's parent company)
Another example may be the linux USB stack, which was later ported to both the Cromwell xbox bios and ReactOS (opensource clone of the Windows NT system, cousin of Wine project).
This is needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Wonderful (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this realistic though? Are companies actually going to take this offer up? If they do, the impact could be awesome (hardware compatibility that could rival Windows and/or Mac OSX)...
Nice one!
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Interesting)
I am sure this is the case statistically, but anecdotally I've noticed that things I don't expect to "just work" (TM) with linux oftentimes do. My girlfriend's digital camera working without a driver install really sort of surprised me as I expected it not to work at all. The same camera often requires driver installs on windows (differing per version). I'm actually quite impressed with Linux's hardware support.
Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Insightful)
Infact Linux supports more devices that any other operating system ever... and thats one of the advantages of open-source kernel drivers... they are maintained with the Kernel, so they remain usable through kernel architecture changes with zero effort from the original contributer of the device-driver. I am sure Microsoft would love to do this with windows, but of course they cannot, as they don't have the source code to the drivers they did not write themselves.
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
And what about Vista's new requirement that all hardware mustn't be compromised by hackers or else the drivers will be remotely disabled? Might a company which produced hardware which is part of the DRM stack risk being more likely to be seen as compromised if it has collaborated with the OSS community?
Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Interesting)
On the plus side, a badly written driver is marginally easier to reverse-engineer than a black box. There are a couple of WiFi chips that had Linux drivers written in this way, and now have much better OpenBSD drivers written by a combination of reverse engineering and examining the Linux code. Some of these drivers have been ported to FreeBSD and, I believe, back to Linux again.
Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Informative)
However, in many cases a hardware company NDA just requires non-disclosure of the hardware documentation itself, and in particular the documentation of the hardware's internal workings. In these cases, the resulting driver generally looks like most other drivers in Linux, including useful constants and helpful comments.
(Not commenting on the ethics of NDAs in general; just presenting information.)
Standard Driver Model? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Standard Driver Model? (Score:5, Informative)
The only small problem is that it requires slightly more intelligence (and some flash memory) in the individual device - something which manufacturers have spent the last 20 years doing their best to avoid.
Re:Standard Driver Model? (Score:4, Insightful)
Xen implements something like this for block and network devices, and the USB and Bluetooth specifications do something similar for a few categories of device. The problem comes with things like GPUs where each new generation provides some extra functionality that the last one didn't; you'd need to constantly update your driver model to work with the new functionality. It's not impossible, but it does require a standards body that can quickly specify interfaces to the new functionality, which is quite improbably.
Re:Standard Driver Model? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Standard Driver Model? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing new? (Score:4, Interesting)
The community already writes free drivers for vendors who provide specs and (even better in some cases) loan some hardware.
There are already situations where Linux devs have been able to work out NDA-acceptable solutions.
Really, all the announcement is saying is, "Look, we do this. We've been doing this for years. Just letting you know how things work over here."
This is definitley new (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually this really is something new, and quite an announcement. It was never the case before that any old random driver would get created by the open source community. The way OSS development generally works is there has to be a strong need, strong backing, or a high fun factor, for things to get done.
Prior to this announcement it's not like there was a group of people dedicated to writing drivers -- just waiting for companies to release new hardware, then they'd scurry to reverse engineer it and write a driver. Nor do companies (generally) release hardware specs in the hopes that others will provide a driver for their product.
A significant portion of initial open source driver development comes from the device manufacturers themselves, and smaller companies without the resources to spearhead these developments simply don't have the ability to have Linux support.
Your conception that "The community already writes free drivers for vendors who provide specs and loan some hardware" isn't true in the vast majority of cases.
This really is a big change, because now anyone can create a hardware device and actually have formal linux support, and have this printed on the box. This creates a formal avenue for companies to easily, reliably, and cheaply have Linux support for their products.
How will the NDA work ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How will the NDA work ? (Score:5, Interesting)
a) no driver for your hardware
b) binary blob kernel patch created by hardware munfacturuers
c) binary blob in kernel tree created under NDA by the kernel team (who have private access to the source)
d) obfuscated code in the kernel tree (with original kept private to those kernel devs that have signed the NDA)
e) uncommented code in the kernel tree (with commented code kept private to those kernel devs that have signed the NDA)
f) fully open source driver
Personally I'll accept anything b or above - I'd prefer d or above, would settles for c but would really like f!!
I wonder where the compromises will be made? How far will kernel devs go? How far will companies go?
Re:How will the NDA work ? (Score:5, Informative)
b) binary blob kernel patch created by hardware munfacturuers
Widely believed to be a license violation.
c) binary blob in kernel tree created under NDA by the kernel team (who have private access to the source)
Almost certainly a license violation. (Can't be distributed with the portions of the kernel written by others who have released their code as GPL)
d) obfuscated code in