Ask New 2.4 Maintainer Marcelo Tosatti Anything

Linus keeps hinting (declaring, even) that he's nearly ready to work full-time on the 2.5 development branch of his kernel, and hand the 2.4 kernel off to Marcelo Tosatti. Marcelo's graciously agreeed to answer questions (you might want to read some of his mailing list contributions first), so here's your chance to ask him what he'll do in the famous footsteps of Linus and Alan Cox, and how he got there. Please only put one question per post; we'll pass along the top-rated comments to Marcelo for his answers, and hear back from him shortly.

Sound drivers

[BlowCat]

The sound drivers are very poorly written. A lot of code is duplicated. Not all drivers support some ioctls. Every driver has its peculiarities, e.g. some drivers reset dsp to mono, 8bit on DSP_RESET, some don't. Some support /dev/audio, some don't.

Not having ALSA in 2.4.x means no good sound support in the stable kernel for another year of two. Do you plan to integrate ALSA into the 2.4 branch? If yes, will it happen after it's done on the 2.5 branch?

Linux in the Latin world?

[The Bungi]

I know you work for a Brazilian company (Conectiva), though your name seems more Italian than not. Regarless, you are (along with Miguel de Icaza, who is from Mexico) probably the most visible non-european/american member of the Linux kernel development community. Do you have any plans to promote or push Linux as a viable alternative to government agencies or companies in Brazil or other Latin American countries?