Should Linux Have a Binary Kernel Driver Layer? 944
zerojoker writes "The discussion is not new but was heated up by a blog entry from Greg Kroah-Hartman: Three OSDL Japan members, namely Fujitsu, NEC and Hitachi are pushing for a stable Kernel driver layer/API, so that driver developers wouldn't need to put their drivers into the main kernel tree. GKH has several points against such an idea." What do you think?
Oh, I'm all for it. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh, I'm all for it. (Score:4, Insightful)
The company isn't really interested in fixing any issues with the drivers -- if you have problems with a bug, you have already paid them all the money they are going to get for that particular piece of hardware.
An example: the !@#$%^&* nVidia proprietary X driver. On some older cards, it will cause kernel oopses, within my usage patterns around once per several hours. Is there anything we can do to fix the problem? I'm not a master kernel hacker, but I do have some rudimentary skills there -- I would have at least some chances to make a fix myself; if I wouldn't succeed, reporting a data-loss bug would make us have it fixed by someone with more knowledge in no time.
On my current desktop, switching to text mode the first time X is run after a boot puts the console into 80x25 mode without even doing a TIOCSWINSZ. Somehow, if I kill the X server, reset the video mode then start X again, everything is fine, until the next boot/resume. What can I do to fix this annoyance? Begging to nVidia does nyet work.
Re:Oh, I'm all for it. (Score:3, Insightful)
I do wish that linux and MacOS X has
Already Got One: NDIS (Score:4, Informative)
This is an inflammatory issue, but a stable interface doesn't necessarily open the kernel up to proprietary drivers. It's a matter of licensing. Any third party could introduce a GPLed abstraction layer. There are big practical advantages to being able to take a GPLed driver's object file and plug it in to any old kernel. In that case there would be no really fundamental reliability or debuggability problems. The remaining problem would be the increasing mismatch between the abstraction presented to the driver and the abstraction supported by the kernel as it develops.
It would be good to separate the discussion into two, one for inflammatory license- and/or ideology-related culs-de-sac, and another technical, to address legitimate needs for stability in drivers that are not (yet) in the kernel tree.
Re:Oh, I'm all for it. (Score:5, Informative)
and people defrauds it (Score:5, Informative)
"In a comment to one of my earlier entries, someone mentioned a driver that bluescreened under normal conditions, but once you enabled the Driver Verifier (to try to catch the driver doing whatever bad thing it was doing), the problem went away. Another commenter bemoaned that WHQL certification didn't seem to improve the quality of the drivers.
Video drivers will do anything to outdo their competition. Everybody knows that they cheat benchmarks, for example. I remember one driver that ran the DirectX "3D Tunnel" demonstration program extremely fast, demonstrating how totally awesome their video card is. Except that if you renamed TUNNEL.EXE to FUNNEL.EXE, it ran slow again.
There was another one that checked if you were printing a specific string used by a popular benchmark program. If so, then it only drew the string a quarter of the time and merely returned without doing anything the other three quarters of the time. Bingo! Their benchmark numbers just quadrupled.
Anyway, similar shenanigans are not unheard of when submitting a driver to WHQL for certification. Some unscrupulous drivers will detect that they are being run by WHQL and disable various features so they pass certification. Of course, they also run dog slow in the WHQL lab, but that's okay, because WHQL is interested in whether the driver contains any bugs, not whether the driver has the fastest triangle fill rate in the industry.
The most common cheat I've seen is drivers which check for a secret "Enable Dubious Optimizations" switch in the registry or some other place external to the driver itself. They take the driver and put it in an installer which does not turn the switch on and submit it to WHQL. When WHQL runs the driver through all its tests, the driver is running in "safe but slow" mode and passes certification with flying colors.
The vendor then takes that driver (now with the WHQL stamp of approval) and puts it inside an installer that enables the secret "Enable Dubious Optimizations" switch. Now the driver sees the switch enabled and performs all sorts of dubious optimizations, none of which were tested by WHQL.
(IOW: it doesn't guarantee stability or quality at all. It's just a false sense of "stability")
where you miss (Score:4, Interesting)
Without them you aren't guaranteed support from Microsoft.
If you are running machines with all certified drivers and WMI/MSI installed applications then Microsoft will be right there with you until the problem is solved. You won't find it written anywhere but Microsoft gurantees that you're machine will not crash (BSOD) if you use certified drivers and MSI installed software. At home this isn't possible, but in some environments it is possible (and a good idea in other places).
In a way you are locked in to what Microsoft has approved, but if they've approved it then the problem is theirs to fix - not yours. Good luck meeting those two requirements, but if you can: hold them to it.
Re:Oh, I'm all for it. (Score:3, Interesting)
Bruce
Re:Oh, I'm all for it. (Score:3, Insightful)
I never had significant problems with certified drivers, but I guess that so
Re:Oh, I'm all for it. (Score:4, Interesting)
or maybe it improves that its drivers so frequently that it cant keep trying to certify it every single time?
Re:*I* have an idea! (Score:5, Interesting)
A hybrid kernel. Open source drivers are compiled into the kernel. There is a API for closed-source drivers to run in user-space.
Does not violate GPL.
Little compromise to stability.
Developers who only want to do closed-source drivers can do so.
Developers have incentive to open source their drivers in order to have better performance and take advantage of newer kernel features (the internal APIs are updated with the kernel, the external APIs stay fixed and fall behind the feature curve).
Win.
Win.
Win.
Unless its just a philosophical question, in which case
Good idea! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh wait... OOPS!
Re:Good idea! (Score:4, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not a linux contributor, but I would think you'd kinda want to guard access to the kernel kinda closely. I mean, sure, anyone can fork it or grab a copy to putz around with, but contributing back into the kernel - that's gotta be just about as stable as a piece of code can be.
Despite some loss in efficiency, I've always been an advocate of abstracted access. To many of the pieces of software we write at my job do we add a logical API, so that we don't always have to open the main code branch every time we want to add a feature.
Driver developers hardly equal kernel developers. Keeping the two logically seperated makes sense - not to mention that driver developers are hardly the only ones that would benefit from this API.
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:3, Interesting)
A stable binary driver API that doesn't mean putting the driver into the kernel is already there. It is called the syscall interface. If you have a stable module ABI as proposed (over and over again, about once a month for th
Benefits kernel users how? (Score:4, Insightful)
I am not a Kernel Developer, but I know some. ;) I guess that my open question is how this would benefit kernel users? Yes, I see it would reduce the workload of kernel devs. Yes, I see it would allow driver developers to not have to go through the kernel code vetting process. But, the kernel code vetting process is what is a strong benefit of using Linux, from a user perspective, as I know that the code is well tested by an army of users and developers.
Once you push driver development out of the kernel, yet give access to kernel internals in this way, you introduce a level of uncertainty in so far as stability and robustness is concerned. One must question why these big comapnies are pushing for this, but most human kernel devs are not.
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure they will, when they have to so they can remain competitive. Until that time we should support vendors that do provide open source versions of their drivers.
Yeah, I can see concerns about stability, but at least there would BE drivers for half the hardware out there.
Do your really believe that the answer is to trade stability for convenience? As the parent said, we would be right back to where Windows is. As more and more of these type of issues come up I think the Linux kernel developers need to stand resolutely on their principals and provide a quality product even at the sacrifice of some usability. It makes no sense at all to trade long term quality of the kernel for a short term solution to the current driver problem. As for the question of who can be 'in the kernel source', anyone can. Anything that gets included in the official stable branch of the kernel will be reviewed by many memebers of the kernel development team. So far I have had excellent success with the official Linux kernels and don't see any reason this will change if they stick with their current methodologies.
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to play the devil's advocate - yes. That is, if you want the average Joe Blow to start even thinking about Linux instead of Windows.
Windows is ubiquitous. OSX has mind share at least in part because almost every peripheral you purchase and plug in just sorta works. Linux has hundreds of thousands of forum posts dedicated to getting standard pieces of hardware - like mainstream video cards - working in the OS.
So in theory, yeah - I'm for allowing closed source drivers to be developed for linux, because without hardware support, you'll have very little non-tech usership of linux.
Just my opinion, of course...
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:5, Informative)
Your statement has been the subject of several discussions here lately. If you are asking if "I" want the average Joe Blow to start using Linux, the answer is "I don't care". I belive the Linux is an excellent operating system that is stable, robust and powerful. I think average Joe Blow should use it for those reasons. Do I care if he does use it? As long as he doesn't call me to clean up his spyware and viruses, or at least doesn't get pissed when I charge him to clean it up, I'm fine with Mr. Blow using any OS he wants.
Thing is, if the Linux development community starts making compromises that jeopordize the security and stablility of the OS just to intice ol' Joe to use Linux we haven't gained anything. All of the reasons to use Linux go away and we haven't progressed. Linux has gained market share due to it's quality, stability and performance. Linux will continue to improve and continue gain market share because of these reasons. Eventually a free market should change to embrace a better product. There is no reason to compromise just for short term acceptance gains.
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:4, Insightful)
Currently it is almost impossible for hardware vendors can provide a binary driver. It must be adapted to every distro and kernel rev. For the most part they don't bother.
Instead, we get reverse-"engineered" (i.e. hacked-together) drivers made by people doing their best to get devices working with no real understanding of how the device works. And you think that promotes stability, performance, and security?
Ideally, we'd have quality open-source drivers for everything. Since that hasn't happened, now what?
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:3)
Your way -might- make desktop adoption a little faster. However, if it worked, it would guarantee that such desktop adoption would do nothing to advance open-source. One reason the kernel -is- so stable is its open nature. If it's allowed now for the kernel to be tied to closed, binary crap, then no matter how much adoption occurs, it'll always be tied to that. On the other hand, if Linux adoption increases, and the principle remains held firm, any vendor who refuses to open-source will be shut out of an ev
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:4, Insightful)
With respect, I think there's more than one question to be considered there:
As I see it:
And after all, this is a deal that will be easier to revisit in the future than it will be to revoke once granted. The pressure to allow binary submissions will continue for as long as Linux as a noticable commercial deploymen. The kernel devs can afford to wait and see here. I expect that's just what they'll do.
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, no, no, no NO. We don't want hardware vendors to write drivers. Besides, most hardware vendors don't want to maintain drivers for Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BeOS, HURD, Xen, Linux, Solaris, and each of the incompatible versions of each of them, as well as any new platforms that arise. Even if they do, whether or not they can write good quality, full-featured, secure drivers for all of these platforms is an open question.
All a vendor needs to do is to make good, solid interface documentation, and make it available without NDAs and other childish restrictions, and the drivers will not only be written, but they'll probably be shipped with the operating systems, and for the most part, just work.
Companies that specialize in PC hardware should stick to the hardware, and let the software specialists write the software.
Third-party IP (was Re:Excellent suggestion!) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:5, Insightful)
You're ignoring a LOT of the praticalities of the matter. Many driver manufactuers can't provide OSS drivers or the necessary info because:
1) It's against the law to provide methods for tampering with the equipment. (e.g. Wifi cards.)
2) Much of the code and/or hardware design is licensed from other parties, and they can't get permission to open it.
3) The ever important Time to Market consideration would be quashed if manufacturers had to wait for the driver to enter the tree then get distributed to the major Linux distros before releasing their hardware.
Besides, most hardware vendors don't want to maintain drivers for Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BeOS, HURD, Xen, Linux, Solaris, and each of the incompatible versions of each of them, as well as any new platforms that arise.
That's why hardware manufacturers would like to see specifications like UDI [wikipedia.org] and NDIS [wikipedia.org] followed. Unfortunately, those wonderful software people who are apparently so much better at this stuff have decided that they don't need anything as passe as a cross-platform driver API. Mr. Stallman is leading the charge on this one. Personally, I think he's stuck on stupid [thepoliticalteen.net], but that's just me.
Here's my personal feelings on this. In the short term driver code has value to manufacturers for whatever IP it may contain. In the long term, driver code has precisely zero value to the OSS community. All they do is allow for more old cruft to hang around. I also think that supporting a cross-platform driver would make everyone's lives easier as Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and whoever else can simply use the same drivers. Such a world would be a hardware Utopia in comparison to the driver issues we have today.
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:3, Interesting)
Having actually done windows driver co-development in partnership with a Japanese hardware vendor before, I can tell you they do consider interfaces and protocols into their hardware proprietry. Remember some "hardware" products are actually computers in and of themselves with mini
Learn to read. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Learn to read. (Score:4, Informative)
That's not protecting IP, its protecting the fact that they are scamming customers.
"Also designs are copyrighted and if you open the source a competitor could argue that companyA neglected its copyright by opening it to the public, so therefore its ok to steal the design. May not be entirely true since copyright is designed to share work, but an ignorant judge could look at it as carelessness for being open."
You have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. Copyright does not need to be protected to be valid, that's trademark.
"WIFI is required to be closed and proprietary by the FCC under Powell. The government can revoke its license to produce wifi cards otherwise."
Yeah, that would explain why several companies have fully open docs for their wifi chips, thus enabling completely open source drivers for them.
The rest of your post is irrelivant windows nonsense that has nothing to do with the topic.
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at nvidias drivers on linux! Always well behind other drivers, and filled with bugs because we have to wait for nvidia to get off thier asses and fix the damn thing.
What happens in 10 years when you're trying to use that binary driver to recover data from an ancient device? If it was an open source driver, you could fix it to work with your system; binary, you're going to have a lot more work to do.
It's much worse than that... (Score:5, Insightful)
No more hacking WRT54G's for you, chump.
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:5, Insightful)
Many drivers suffer quality issues or are just abandoned because drivers must be changed to work with each new kernel. That is time that could be spent stabilizing them, improving them, or writing new drivers. It is probably the single biggest hurdle to getting a broad range of driver support for Linux.
For some drivers we already do have an API. For example, sound cards can use ALSA instead of coding directly to the kernel. Driver quality and quantity improved significantly because of ALSA. The same thing goes with SANE. The only problem there is that SCSI and USB support has been lagging.
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, it takes NVIDIA some time to catch up to the latest kernel changes, but they do a damn decent job considering the kernel is a moving target. If that were not the case, their drivers, which are already the best available, would be even better.
Many hardware manufacturers are not in a posit
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, yes. Because everybody knows that being open source is a magical recipe for never having any bugs.
Writing video drivers is hard dude, and nVidia employ several experienced people who do it full time. I've seen them discuss technical issues in public before and have no doubt in my mind that they are experts.
Given how many open source drivers are buggy as hell (i810 audio, hello) there must be another explanation. Here's one try.
I hypothesise that what determines the quality of a driver is the number and quality of developers working on them. Closed source drivers sometimes suffer because the quality and/or quantity of developers writing those drivers isn't good enough. Being open source means that theoretically the quantity and quality of developers is unbounded. However, note that this is theory - being open doesn't actually imply that you will suddenly get legions of experts in video hardware writing your drivers for you. It merely makes it possible.
To be honest, I have serious doubts that we'd have such good drivers if nVidia GPLd them tomorrow and simultaneously fired all of their Linux developers. Being closed doesn't mean you can't have good people working on it, and being open doesn't mean you will. It simply alters the bounds of the possible.
Re:Excellent suggestion! (Score:3, Insightful)
Drivers run as kernel-level code.
Closed source code linked into the kernel gets kernel-level privileges. Alone, that is a scary thing.
Worse, binary drivers mean support for only the platforms that vendors choose to support. Users of less popular architectures miss out.
Binary Drivers = Maint. Nightmare + Security Woes (Score:3, Insightful)
GKH raises good points about how a stable binary driver interface will open the floodgates to both security problems and to update/maintenance problems. As it stands right now, Linux kernel developers can quickly respond to threats because they are able to fix all instances of a given problem, in
Already done (Score:3, Informative)
For graphics, GGI and KGI would allow direct binary-only drivers to be written that applications can use, again without modifying the kernel.
Not sure whether you could make any use of the ABI/IBCS work for drivers, but they certainly allow "foreign" binaries to run under Linux, without anything foreign being put in the kernel itself.
In other word
No Thanks! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No Thanks! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No Thanks! (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that you will be stuck with the mistakes for the same time.
You can't improve the kernel anymore because you have to keep supporting those mistakes.
You would have to add huge glue layers to your kernels to keep emulating thos mistakes.
It is a bad idea. It has only advantages to those driver writers who want to stay far away from the kernel and want to keep using their crap for a long time. The kernel and the kernel writers are not going to get better from it (they only get extra work supporting lazy driver writers) why should they support it?
Linux development works very easy: do it yourself or convince someone else to do it.
You can convince other people either by motivating them with proper reasoning (and
Nobody has been throwing enough money yet to get the kernel developpers to do it. (And very likely nobody ever will throw enough)
Jeroen
Re:No Thanks! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No Thanks! (Score:4, Funny)
What, you want to support Flying Spaghetti Code Drivers or something?
Re:No Thanks! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because of this, I'm 100% not convinced making binary driver developers lives harder changes anything. Are large businesses (the type who make hardware that's difficult to reverse engineer) likely to say, hey, gosh, you know this Greg KH guy kind of doesn't like closed drivers, maybe we should open them up to please him? Nope. They'll just work around the difficulties or not provide drivers at all.
I've been a Wine developer for years and have spent many hours doing this impossible thing of which you speak, and your average copy of MS Word or Steam is a LOT larger than your average driver. Yes, it's hard. No, it's not impossible. I've heard various excuses as to why kernel development is just different!! to userland software development, and don't buy it. Yes, having to reboot when a crash occurs is a royal pain in the ass, but so is not being able to get a backtrace because the game you're investigating treats any attempt at attaching a debugger as an attempt to hax0r its copy protection. Different space, different challenges. It's still possible.
Bad (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't go there, it protects Linux from getting tripped up, and devalues any hardware that doesn't support Linux.
Don't underestimate the important of driver support for Linux, you practically can't make any server component without a good solid Linux driver.
Amen! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Amen! (Score:5, Informative)
It is not welcome. Linux is about Open Source, and allowing people to link-in binary closed drivers goes against this.
Too much politics surrounding Linux? Where have you been? It has been the policy of the Linux kernel for a long time that it would never stablize a binary driver interface, in order to prevent people from not making their drivers open source.
The idea behind Linux is that an Operating System should be Open, and Free (as in speech), and that nothing should hinder this. Binary drivers are exactly this sort of hinderance.
You may be upset that you don't have drivers for product XY because that company doesn't want to play along, but if you're trying to change the way the world does software, you can't go "ok, just because we *really* want your drivers, we're going to bend the rules for you."
Cut the dogma, there are technical reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not welcome. Linux is about Open Source, and allowing people to link-in binary closed drivers goes against this.
Bypassing the dogma of the above, there are numerous pragmatic reasons why this would be better for linux, even if you don't include support for binary third-party drivers.
Sure, some of these are extreme cases. You can usually get away with just re-compiling the driver, and occasionally, you can even use the binary from the existing version.
The point is you should *always* be able to do this wihtin the same major kernel version. There is no technical reason, aside form the politicis of not wanting to ever allow binary drivers, to not have a stable driver API.
Imagine if the Mozilla plugin API changed with every new version of Firefox. And look at all the complaints when a new Firefox version doesn't work with all the old extentions. It is the exact same.
Ok that's fine BUT... (Score:5, Insightful)
The simple fact of the matter is that most companies are not willing to go open source, for software or drivers. You can argue that's a bad thing, but it is the reality of the situation. So, if open source is out in their book, either because of contractual obligations or mentality or whatever, they are left with two choices:
1) Do Linux drivers, and update them every time the interface changes, which can be as often as every minor kernel revision.
2) Ignore Linux, and let the community write the drivers if they want.
The problem is that Linux is a bit player. They are larger than the other bit players, but they are still tiny, less than 10%. Given that the continous rewrites can get expensive, the choice for many will simply be not to write the driver.
So if you are ok with that, then great, but don't get mad at companies when they won't play by your rules. Are they being unaccomidating? Sure, but so are you.
In the end, it comes down to needing to make a decision of what you want Linux to be. If you want Linux to try and become the next big thing in OSes and start to really make an entrance in the home market, standardisation is needed. Standard APIs, standard UIs, inter-version consistencies, etc. In essence, it needs to become more like OS-X. Now if you are ok with Linux being more of a geek/server OS then that's not necessary, but you can't demand the world change around you.
Re:Amen! (Score:3, Informative)
What gives you the right to impose that restriction on me ?
Um... I write the code? If you don't like it, then you can go use something with better driver support, like Windows.
If binary drivers were supported and it were up to companies to choose to support them or not, then they wouldn't
Again, this is all an ideological argument. If you don't like the ideological position that Linux is forwarding, then you're free to
Re:This is the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny how you warp things around.
Re:This is the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank goodness for "too much politics" (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't about "politics". It's about policy and philosophy.
If the hardware doesn't work with Linux, don't buy the hardware/pester the vendor for an open driver, or don't run Linux.
Why post this link without the followup? (Score:5, Informative)
Some misunderstandings were made. But of course, if they posted this link, there'd be no point to posting TFA or the arguments that will almost certainly follow.
Solves the reason why I gave up Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
If you don't force the manufacturers to include their driver source in the kernel, you might get them to release actual drivers for their new hardware.
Re:Solves the reason why I gave up Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, for the record, Linux doesn't suck. But I found I could get my command line fix with XP and Cygwin, without the hardware ann
Re:Solves the reason why I gave up Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
You people need to figure out exactly what you want, Linux for the masses (read: grandma, mom, etc) or an O/S where you have to spend valuable time just getting it to work with regular hardware. You bashed the poster for buying "random hardware" and expecting it to work even though you don't know what the hardware in question was, yet in your own message you bought 3 "bleeding edge" Gateway laptops (a fairly well known manufacturer) and you had to (in your words) "_try_ to make it work."
I was going to post this anonymously, but it would of course be modded a troll at that point. Let my karma burn for all I care.
Re:Solves the reason why I gave up Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that one shouldn't have to even try to make it work. A desktop operating system in the form of a desktop oriented Linux distribution should be as painless as possible to set up. Preferably there should not be even the need to have a C compiler present. Shove in the installation CD/DVD and boot it up and the installer should take care of everything hardwareconfiguraitonwise.
With Linux and new hardware this is currently just a distant dream as the drivers simply aren't there when the hardware
No (Score:5, Insightful)
It also precludes anyone else from fixing bugs in the broken, half assed crap most corporates spit out these days.
Re:No (Score:3, Interesting)
Then you go and fire the developer(s) who called it a "stable" ABI.
By definition, a "stable" ABI should change very rarely, and provide backwards compatibility.
Without this, it ain't stable.
Re:No (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems unlikely at this point that Nvidia will ever open-source their video card drivers. (They might not even be able to legally - it's not uncommon for commercial software to contain code from third parties.) Assuming that this is the case, a stable ABI would make Nvidia's task much easier and would probably result in higher quality Linux d
of course it should (Score:5, Insightful)
would it really hurt so much to guarantee a stable DKI? doesn't have to freeze the whole kernel, just a subset of functions that will be guaranteed to work as they do now in perpetuity.
backwards compatibility is just as important to driver writers as it is to app writers.
doesn't even have to be binary backwards compatible, source level would be sufficient for most.
Re:of course it should (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:of course it should (Score:3, Interesting)
Show me one example of a piece of hardware where the specifications are available (not under some absurd NDA), that has no or poor Linux support. The kernel/driver developers seem more than willing to write the driver and keep up with the "esoteri
Re:of course it should (Score:3, Insightful)
The real problem is this need to have unique drivers for every instance of hardware. Part of that problem is that manufacturers keep wanting to put their code in the host system for various reason. One common reason is to use the host CPU for work they are too cheap to do in the device they are selling. And another that has come out is their desire to access the host system itself (and something in the kernel involves a huge amount of access).
This practice is bad because it compromises the integrity, re
Stability like that leads to stagnation and death (Score:5, Insightful)
Continual refactoring is worth far more than some supposed binary API which prevents changes. Get rid of binary drivers! If companies are so paranoid that they want binary drivers, then the hell with them. Linux can advance better without that baggage.
Re:Stability like that leads to stagnation and dea (Score:3, Funny)
One of Linux's great strengths is the flexibility of changing to meet new needs and not being hobbled by rigid backwards compatibility.
Yeah, let's hobble it with dependency hell instead.
Of two minds (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who supports free software, and has struggled with NVIDIA's video drivers (and they're at least trying to meet us halfway by making it as easy as possible to install their closed-source driver under the current system) I can see the negative consequences of encouraging binary-only drivers.
*Example: Promise SX6000. Old cards work with I20, newer ones use their own interface. An open source driver is available, at least for the 2.4 kernel, but good luck if you want to get your installer's kernel to use it. Unless you can create a driver disk, a byzantine task in itself, you're stuck with a few outdated versions of Red Hat, SuSE, and I think TurboLinux.
Binary drivers should be outside the kernel (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, all drivers should be outside the kernel, as in QNX [qnx.com], and now Minix 3. But it's probably too late to do that to Linux.
As the article says, it's illegal, and a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
What people tend to forget about this is that it's a bad idea- from most every perspective.
The Linux kernel was written as a Free Softwate alternative to the existing *nix systems.
We have thousands of drivers in the kernel from a combination of development efforts. Sometimes a driver is written by an independant kernel developer, and sometimes it's written from the company producing the hardware, working alongside the community.
What these companies want is to be able to have thier cake without giving back to the community. This is a very slippery slope at the least, and illegal at best, since these sorts of links to binary kernel drivers have been long known to be illegal to distribute alongside the kernel (unless special previsions are made, such as a userland driver).
Also, binary drivers have been known to be buggy and essentially removie the kernel developers from a position where they have control over the kernel as a whole project. I won't even go into the issues associated with a possible security hole in a binary driver, or a binary driver with, for example, spyware in it.
The arguement for it is, of course, that this might mean more drivers. This is a test of our strength as a community. Doing the right thing is harder. It means we won't have all the hardware at all times, and certainly not the newest thing. But we retain control over our computers.
It's hard to say no, but this looks like a clear case where we have to.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As the article says, it's illegal, and a bad id (Score:5, Insightful)
But why not try our best to have as much control as we can?
Re:As the article says, it's illegal, and a bad id (Score:3, Insightful)
The bottom line is that having code be open is only important to a fraction of *developers*, and an extremely small small fraction of the general populance. Ultimately
Hell, no! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hell, no! (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, wait, it's been done. He didn't listen.
Userspace, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Userspace, anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Userspace, anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
For a simple "find ~ |
Re:Userspace, anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
Binary drivers are evil (Score:3, Insightful)
In my opinion, binary drivers are worse than no drivers at all because they release the pressure on the manufacturer. They can say they support Linux which in case of binary drivers is simply not true.
Absolutely (Score:5, Insightful)
One of Linux's biggest problems is the lack of device drivers for common devices, especially newer video cards. Let's face it, companies like ATI and NVIDIA aren't going to release fully open-source drivers. It would be wonderful if they would, but it would also be wonderful if we had flying cars.
Having a stable binary driver interface would make it easier for hardware manufacturers to embrace Linux, give things like wireless chipsets more usability on Linux and drive further adoption of Linux as a viable competitor to more proprietary solutions
The perfect is the enemy of the good, and the more Linux gains a foothold the better it is for open source. Insisting that device manufacturers need to have on-staff kernel hackers in order to keep ahead of a frequently-changing kernel makes it that much harder for manufacturers to support Linux as a viable alternative.
Provided Linux can have a stable binary driver infrastructure that doesn't harm stability, it would greatly help in the adoption of Linux worldwide.
Re:Absolutely (Score:3, Informative)
You might aswell read the greg's blog. Linux can't have a stable binary interface unless you: 1) lose performance (WDM-like interfaces come with a cost) or 2) lose freedom to configure your kernel (you don't allow to change some of the current kernel options like ej: regparm)
Define "Stable" (Score:4, Insightful)
Assuming that we had a stable kernel source interface for the kernel, a binary interface would naturally happen too, right? Wrong. Please consider the following facts about the Linux kernel:
But see, the thing is... a "stable" binary interface requires that structures used specify padding, alignment, and fields to be fixed! If these can vary, then by definition , it's not stable. Ditto the variations that depend on kernel build options.
Now, if you want to make the case that it's not possible / practical to make an interface that can cover all of these conditions adequately, well, by all means, do so (though I'd say that the hundreds of existing operating systems with binary interfaces show that this isn't the case in the general sense).
But what I see here is a relatively weak technical argument that is being used to justify an ideological decision.
Does time change the debate? (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that when the Linux kernel was young and untried, standardizing a binary API was bound to become a millstone in a short period of time, as the kernel internals were in a constant state of churn and iterative improvement. Nowadays though, surely, the kernel has been "shaken down" enough that it could afford to commit to binary APIs that are stable at least throughout each minor version number?
Returning to ideology, I can see how a stable binary API would be useful even to open source hardware. How much easier is it, to say "drop this file under
In itself, that says nothing, either pro or anti, about the availability of driver source.
out of touch linux kernel 'hackers' (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, this whole discussion is as silly as the one about not putting a kernel debugger in the main kernel source code. Frankly, linux desperatly needs both a kernel debugger, and an ABI to be a REAL alternative for many customers. It also needs the ABI for driver developers so that we can write a single driver and expect it to work on the dozens of flavors of linux we are expected to support. Saying that everyone should opensource their drivers is like saying food should be free. It isn't going to to happen and wishing for it, won't make it happen any sooner. In the interm, almost all the hardware out there has better support on windows (Our sysadmin can't even get support for major linux distributions, from major hardware vendors, even when they have little linux logos on their hardware and websites) the windows drivers tend, to accually work, and they almost always have better features sets. This isn't going to change as long as the "opensource" community treats hardware vendors that think they have IP in the driver as second class citizens.
Oh, and for people who don't accually work for hardware companies that ship drivers, driver development is often times an expensive process, not because the software engineers are expensive, but because the hardware and software needs to be tested and certified in particular enviroments. There are orders of magnitude more linux distributions this makes it cost orders of magnitude more to test and support than a half dozen windows enviroments, most of which can be tested at microsoft, or one of the major OEM's if the hardware isn't avialable onsite. Putting 10x the money into a market that may be less than 1/10 of sales is not always a good idea, especially when resources are limited. Creating an proper ABI helps to solve this problem.
That said, if the damn linux kernel accually had a real architecture, it could support an ABI, and even isolate itself from rogue drivers. As it is, the kernel arch is pretty much non existant and just a pile of code that tends to behave like a real kernel, except when you try to do something a little outside of the mainstream desktop or small web server enviroment. This was fine when the whole kernel was just a few hundred thousand lines, but given its current size its getting massivly unmaintainable. This is proven by the fact that linux system stability seems to have gotten really bad over the last few years. Getting to a stable system, takes a lot of vendor testing by the likes of Suse, Redhat, etc.
Lastly, the tainted concept works fine for the kernel developers, why not carry it forwared so that any binary driver simply marks the kernel as having a binary module loaded, and uses the standard abstract interfaces instead of linking against all kinds of unneeded kernel crap that just provides the posibility to screw something up.
Re:out of touch linux kernel 'hackers' (Score:5, Informative)
Linus has said publically many times that the reason that there is not ABI is because he doesn't want one. Binary drivers for *anything* end up screwing stuff up. When they do, there is NOTHING anyone but the original author can do. The code stagnates, users get shut out without any help and nobody is any the wiser as to how that hardware actually worked in the first place.
That's WHY there is stuff like the kernel module license tainting, so that the kernel developers look at a problem, see that you have the massive unknown of a in-kernel binary loaded and can instantly filter your report out. They don't care that your binary driver doesn't work. They can't help you.
Additionally, setting anything into a static position means that development of it ends and stagnates. You'll never get a static interface that you can use to extend the drivers when new features come along. You end up with all sorts of kludges and interface versioning to try to take account of new things.
Linux is developed as an independent operating system, not Windows 2006. No-one wants to make you use it if you don't want to. I doubt Linux was ever intended as anything other than a "pure", almost theoretical, system; that is, one that can be constantly redesigned from the ground up to the way it should have been, not kludged to make it fit your eight-year-old driver (which the author is no longer available to update) for a mouse that happens to still use the old interface.
"Frankly, linux desperatly needs both a kernel debugger, and an ABI to be a REAL alternative for many customers."
Whoa, magic word customers. Linux doesn't have customers. Your company may have customers. There's no obligation on Linux to help you get/keep your customers. People use Linux because they want to. How often does Linus appear on your telly begging you to buy into Linux? Never. Because he doesn't care if you do or not. However, I do imagine it feels pretty nice to him that you do want to use it.
"It also needs the ABI for driver developers so that we can write a single driver and expect it to work on the dozens of flavors of linux we are expected to support."
*You* are expected to support whatever you decide to make. Unfortunately, the linux kernel developers are expected to support YOU, your hardware and everyone else in the world. They don't because they cannot and have no reason to. Even if they had your complete source code, they cannot be expected to maintain your driver for you (which is what will happen when your company goes bust / gets bored with OS).
Sometimes the best-written drivers in the world are not taken into the kernel because they don't quite fit and the maintainance involved in keeping them in the kernel is too difficult. Your driver, if it is to have any support in the kernel, needs to be able to be updated on any kernel-coder's whim in order to make the whole a better system. You can't do that with binaries, you can't even do it with stable interfaces. You have to have the source.
The kernel coders have never promised that your stuff will always work (unless it is designed to run purely from userspace... several times Linus has says that userspace interfaces will not MUCH change over time.). They haven't because they cannot.
The nature of the system is changes to bring improvements, from the interrupt system to the IDE interfaces, from the schedulers to the userspace interfaces such as sysfs or procfs, Linux changes and evolves over time and they cannot guarantee that anything other than userspace syscalls and the like will not be broken, changed or improved between one kernel release and the next.
When the linux kernel people discover a new way to write drivers that sees enhancements across the board, chances are that they are going to break any of your "single driver" models. That's why they won't give you one. Them im
Re:out of touch linux kernel 'hackers' (Score:5, Informative)
Additionally, setting anything into a static position means that development of it ends and stagnates.
Really? Could have fooled me... Windows can still run DOS and Windows applications from 20 years ago, linux can still run application from 10 years ago. When an API is created, usually there are hooks for extending it in the future. I wouldn't say either one has stagnated, over the course of the last 10 years. If that were the case windows wouldn't run on my quad 64-bit athlon.
*You* are expected to support whatever you decide to make. Unfortunately, the linux kernel developers are expected to support YOU, your hardware and everyone else in the world.
But its our brand which gets damaged, when plugged into a linux box, and it works at 1/4 speed, or looses data because the developer who implemented the driver forgot some important edge case.
They really don't care about you and your binary drivers
No, but the weekly calls by linux users asking for them says that Linus and friends are only a small part of the community.
Stick a Knoppix CD in a computer and see how much of the hardware is supported by default. 90% if not more? Include binary-only winmodem/USB ADSL/philips webcam etc. drivers and you get close to 99%.
Sure, linux supports a lot of hardware, but there is a lot it doesn't support, or supports in a seriously half ass way. I would venture a guess that about 40% of the drivers in the kernel don't actually work based on my experience running linux since the early '90s. When I say don't actually work, i'm saying the driver cannot recover from rare hardware error conditions (like FC cable pulls for example), doesn't fully work. Doesn't work in all situations, for example SCSI adapters that work fine with harddrives but don't work with tape drives because they cannot deal with the rare condition of a tape drive returning check conditions and data at the same time. Or, works fine at some fraction of its rated capability. This isn't counting the fact that the kernel developers often break functionality in the kernel drivers when they change stuff and it doesn't get discovered for 6 months, because the developer making the change didn't test the driver that was affected. Now, your average slashdot weeny doesn't see this because they have standard whitebox or dell machines, that are the same as the other 90% of slashdot weenies. In real life there is a vast amount of strange hardware out there, professional audio cards, hardware encryption engines, 4 port fiber channel cards, ficon, 10G ethernet cards, large disk arrays, big memory systems, 10's of different types of system management interfaces for monitoring things like, system ECC soft errors, redundant power supplies status, etc. The list goes on. In many cases the linux driver was written and tested a year ago, a bunch of people are using it in a production environment and it has been broken for 6 months in the mainstream kernels. I was responsible for fixing a number of race conditions in the VMM a couple of years ago, that only occurred with a SMP box that had more than a couple G of RAM (a rarity back then). This was suppose to work, but it didn't because the people with 6G of ram didn't test it with SMP applications and the people with >2 CPU's didn't test with more than a few hundred megs of RAM. Recently I tried bench marking a 3TB disk array in linux, only to discover that it didn't work in over half of the file systems I tried (XFS, Reiser, JFS, ext2, ext3) and in at least one case worked but was so slow it was unusabl
necessary for the desktop (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's a sample of what I put up with. I downloaded Agnula Demudi 1.2.1 and installed it with the 2.6 kernel. I was ready to install some Nvidia drivers. But after some searching, I couldn't find any binary driver interfaces compatible with my kernel. Fine, I can compile my own. So I download the interface sources and launch module-assistant. It complains that riva driver support in my kernel conflicts with the nvidia driver, and I need to recompile the kernel. (I then went through the joy of trying to find the hidden demudi sources and figuring out how to patche them and configure them, ultimately failing to compile it, but this is getting away from the topic.) Finally, I said screw it.
You might blame the distro, but it's really the kernel at fault here. Recompiling the kernel to support a driver is NOT something that a user should have to do. Windows does not require you to recompile your kernel to install drivers.
I would rather have drivers than fanaticism (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as Linux kernel developers complain that binary-only drivers are "illegal", Linux will have less hardware support. One of the major complaints people have against Linux is that a lot of devices that one can attach to a Windows machine plain simply do not work in Linux (I still think Linux is far behind Windows when it comes to wireless drivers, for example). I want to see a true alternative to Windows on the desktop; GPL fanaticism and an inability to understnad how big corporations work harms this.
User-level drivers (Score:3, Interesting)
Drivers that need more elaborate API's or need more speed will be stuck with the mutable binary interface and occasional GPL restrictions. Too bad. A lot of interesting drivers do not need this speed. And those that do may force the interface to user-level drivers to be improved until it is usable, which is a very desirable result.
This is why I don't write device drivers for Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, congratulations. You have your religous purity. And guess what- it's comming at a cost. You wonder why Linux isn't more popular on the desktop? Well, here's part of the reason. It's hardware support will always- ALWAYS- be behind that of Windows. Why? Because when the hardware ships, it ships with Windows drivers that the hardware vendor wrote with it. Note that Windows pulls the same sort of API changing crap that Linux does. The difference is that the hardware vendors look at Windows, and the half man-year per year cost of supporting Windows costs, and go "but we have to support Windows if we want to sell more than 3 units." They then look at Linux, and the half man-year per year cost of support Linux, and go "Supporting Linux is not cost-effective at this time." I know, because I've seen this happen. So now the hardware is out there. And now we wait, for someone willing to step up and volunteer the time to write, and maintain indefinately, the driver. Someone less capable of doing it than the hardware manufacturer (this isn't to question the capabilities of the current kernel developers, but the fact of the matter is that there is a huge advantage to being three cubes down from the hardware developers, and capable of wandering over and asking direct questions, instead of having to reverse engineer what is really going on, having worked both ways).
So this is the fundamental question: which is worse. Having binary-only proprietary drivers, or being forever behind in hardware support and not having people contribute simply because they don't feel like having to constantly update the driver once they finish it, they'd like to be able to move on. I come down on one side, Linus and the kernel developers down on the other.
Fine. Their kernel. Their problem.
Re:This is why I don't write device drivers for Li (Score:3, Insightful)
LHQL / Driver development costs (Score:4, Insightful)
Initial costs associated with a manufacturer-supported driver:
Ongoing costs associated with a manufacturer-supported driver:
These costs exist even if a version of the driver is merged into the mainline kernel. The only problem solved by such source-level merging is compatibility with the latest kernel version. It is not acceptable to the manufacturers' customers to be required to update to the latest kernel/distribution to be able to use the device.
Here's the key point: If there is no binary interface between the driver and the kernel, all of the above costs skyrocket. You have M kernel versions against N distributions, with the total increasing over the life of the product. If there is a binary interface guarantee from the kernel development team to change only very slowly and only extremely rarely breaking compatibility -- like the guarantee Windows provides -- then the incremental costs are containable. It is reasonable to expect that 95% of their testing on 2.6.5 is valid on 2.6.14.
The perfectly reasonable response from kernel developers is that with closed-source drivers they get stuck debugging problems that are't kernel-related (I don't hold ideology to be economically significant so I'll ignore it here, without insult to people's strong opinions on the subject). Their proposed solution is to require the driver's source before they'll help with the debugging.
From the manufacturers' point of view that's a very draconian requirement. They are justifiably concerned about intellectual property (availability of the source makes it much easier for competitors to reverse-engineer the hardware/firmware). Surely there must be a middle ground. Is there some way to have a relationship between the device manufacturers and the kernel developers that minimizes everyone's costs?
I think there is. Note that all of the above costs and issues are just as valid in the Windows world as in the Linux world. Microsoft doesn't want to deal with bad drivers crashing their systems, costing them both development/debugging time and reduced perceived stability (--> lower sales). Their solution is the Windows Hardware Quality Lab (WHQL).
The WHQL is a separate entity from Microsoft. Device manufacturers are required to submit their driver source (effectively under NDA) along with their device. The WHQL staff runs the driver through a battery of tests, probably mostly automated. If the device and driver meet stability standards set by Microsoft, the driver is signed by WHQL. Windows checks for this signature at installation time and warns the administrator if it is not present. Microsoft can reasonably refuse to support non-WHQL-signed drivers when crashes occur, for exactly the same reasons that Linux kernel developers refuse to support drivers without the source. This system has been the single most important factor in Windows' significan
Re:Only one word (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Only one word (Score:3, Interesting)
Why do we still have to have a user program (X) with device drivers in it? (Would anybody think it's a good idea if the Linux kernel didn't have any sound drivers, and required gstreamer to implement its own?)
It seems we have two competing driver models in Linux: some are in the kernel, and provide a consistent interface (sound cards, SCSI/IDE/... cards, network cards), and some aren't in the kernel at
Re:Only one word (Score:5, Insightful)
the question I have for this is "why?" wouldn't a stable binary API likely result in far more third party hardware support for linux? possibly more laptops that are actually compatible with linux?
This seems like a case of open source programmers shooting themselves in the foot because they want everything to be open source... not every application and driver is going to be made open source just to suit the desires of the linux development community. It seems to me that sticking to a hard party line against closed source software instead of trying to co-exist with said software is bound to keep linux in relative obscurity and pretty much ensure that it never becomes a viable competitor in the desktop market.
Re:Only one word (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, it would turn Linux into the same kind of piece of shit that Windows is, and defeat the entire purpose of using it!
Re:Only one word (Score:3, Informative)
Also a lot of people mix up the issue of "binary vs C" with "closed vs open". You can have open source binary drivers, and that's often a convenient thing for end users to have (because t
Linus' words, now for real (Score:5, Insightful)
- Linus Torvalds on linux-kernel
And many people forgets that non-gpl drivers may be very well impossible to write at all (at least some lawyers think this), drivers are not at all like an app is WRT to gtk, drivers are more like "plugins". Plus, a closed driver module makes MUCH HARDER to debug bugs if the driver is doing bad things, and you can't know that (which makes harder to stabilize and/or develop the kernel. Several closed drivers can make it a hell or impossible at all.
Re:Only one word (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought that Linus usually put technical correctness above political correctness, but it looks like I was wrong.
Re:GO FOR IT (Score:3, Interesting)
Having to "hunt down drivers" is an artifact of the old third-party binary driver world. When hardware specifications are available to developers, those developers can add the hardware support to the kernel -- which means it ships with the distribution.
If there's one thing you'll guarantee by providing a binary-only driver interface, it's that you'll have to spend a lot of time hunting down drivers.