Know Any Hardware Needing Better Linux Support? 518
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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Joe User wants (the what) simple booklet printing, for example.
The fact that Person A hacks the kernel, whereas Person B hacks CUPS (the why) amounts to minutia.
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Well, until we can do everything a computer can do with Linux, it's not going to be as widespread as it should be.
I'll have to explore this term, "userspace" because it's not familiar to me (I'm just a Ubuntu Studio user, and a fairly new one at that. I'm not a Linux expert like many of you here), but whatever this "userspace" is, it sounds like it's something that someone in the Linux development community ought to handle.
Maybe the difference between a successful OS and one that's not so successful is how well it integrates the "userspace" experience.
But I'm just guessing.
And before you tell me to RTFA, It's only 6:30am and I'm waiting for the coffee water to heat up. I'm not R'ing any F'ing A until I've had one or two cups, thank you very much.
Re:First (Score:4, Informative)
From an end user's perspective, "userspace" is what you see, the programs you start up and interact with. "kernelspace" is something you only encounter when the system crashes or a floppy drive is stuck or a line printer on fire etc.
From a technological point of view, Unix-like operating systems have a clear separation between "kernelspace" and "userspace". The kernel is a program that always runs and "does everything". It is supposed to only do the low-level tasks, close to hardware, such as scheduling (which userspace program is allowed to run next) and I/O (send bits to a parallel port printer and wait x microseconds).
Between kernel and userspace is a software library called the system library; for Unix-like OSes usually written in C, libc. This contains functions like write() and read() that are implemented by sending commands to the kernel to do something via "system calls". Whether those commands are actually executed then depends on the permissions model, because programs using the system library are all run as if executed by a "user".
This brings us to userspace: an end-user wanting to print something in the gimp program presses a button, the gimp program is running under the privileges of that end user, the userspace programmers who wrote gimp tied the "print button press" action to a gimp function which at one point does a libc call write(printer, data), the C library function write() takes the data and <start handwaving> invokes the kernel's SYS_write() call (I think) with permissions from that end user and a pointer to the data in user memory and a pointer to the printer device special file (everything looks like a file in Unix) and then the gimp program will just sleep and halt and be activated again when the kernel decides to give it another slice of CPU time (for example, after the kernel has done the actual printing, or at least called the kernel functions to get the actual what-have-you brand printer driver functions to do their voodoo with the user-presented data).</end vague handwaving>
But as you can probably tell I'm not a real system programmer so I'll gladly let someone else correct me from here :-)
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I think the confusion in this discussion about printer drivers is like this: the low-level printer drivers are in the Linux kernel and are therefore programmed by what you could call "kernel programmers". These people have offered to write drivers for all kinds of equipment if the manufacturers can't be bothered to write them due to perceived lack of marketshare.
The problem with printers is that these low-lev
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I think that few devices can be programmed in userspace...but device drivers can be accessed and instructed (I want to say programmed, but in this context that's ambiguous) from usersapce.
CUPS is one particular very complex driver. It's got it's own special project just to handle printers, because handling printers is complicated. (And the manufacturers don't make it easier.) It's also because handling printers is o
Re:First (Score:4, Insightful)
This hasn't been set up for Joe User.
It's been set up so that manufacturers can easily have their hardware supported.
Joe gets the benefit later, when (s)he buys supported hardware.
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Your point is a good one, but the tension here is not the why but the what.
Joe User wants (the what) simple booklet printing, for example.
The fact that Person A hacks the kernel, whereas Person B hacks CUPS (the why) amounts to minutia.
Only if you don't understand how Linux (as in the whole distro) is put together. The Kernel is a completely different project to CUPS or SANE.
A Windows analogy would be complaining to Microsoft because there was no driver for your particular model Epson printer.
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A general linux user does not care how the distro has been put together. He or she just wants it to work.
I respect anyone's choice to work only in kernel-land if they so desire, but collecting hundreds of people who say "I only can or want to do kernel" only to then complain that these folks don't have enough work to do while on the other side of the wall there are Himalayan mountains of work left over is just plain ridiculous. What's even more ridiculous, is to claim that "the linux driver problem is ove
300 lazy bums (Score:3, Interesting)
The original message was hardly a complaint, just a way to make hardware manufactures aware of the possibility of having this group write
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I'm stating that it is wrong for that someone (whether or not he is a provider of 'A') to claim that the 'B' thing that I want is a non-issue simply because he does not want to work on it (irrespective even of the reason why he doesn't).
No one's saying it's a non-issue. In fact, the Linux driver project webpage has this to say about printers:
All Linux printer drivers are done in userspace. Contact the Linux Printing Project [linuxprinting.org] if you have a printer that you wish to get properly supported under Linux.
So not only are they NOT saying it's a non-issue, they're directing people to where they should go for printer issues.
Besides that, you're not going to tell me that people smart enough to learn how to code a kernel can not learn how to implement a user space printer driver. I'm not saying that they have to do that, but they sure can if the[y] want to.
That's probably true, but who are you to tell unpaid volunteers what to do with their time? They're Linux kernel developers. It's what they do. I imagine they spend a lot of their free time on it, and spending their free time on other things (like learning how to reverse-engineer
Re:First (Score:5, Insightful)
Why aren't the LDP people and the SANE people working together? A device is a device no matter what the interface. The end user doesn't really care how "device X" hooks up, or how the driver is loaded. They just want it to work.
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These are kernel developers, not userspace developers. Hence, userspace issues are outside the scope of their efforts. It doesn't mean that they're ignoring it; it's just not what they do.
Wikipedia has good links to tell you more about kernel [wikipedia.org] and userspace [wikipedia.org], if that's your sticking point.
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I have taken your complaints on board and shared them with the Project Manager in charge of Open Source. As a result, he has re-allocated most of the developers to the task of writing printer drivers, or whatever the fuck it is you're going on about. Most of them don't have any experience writing printer drivers
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No, it makes perfect sense -- it's just confusing because of an odd use of terminology (at least as compared to Windows).
When people complain about printer drivers under Linux, they're not talking about kernel modules -- what most of us would think of as "drivers" in the traditional sense. Linux already has USB/parallel port/whatever kernel modules that handle everything related to the communication with the device. The complaint is in the "device-specific-properties" end; since the USB/parallel port/whatever kernel modules are generic, handling only the lowest layers of how communications on the bus takes place, they don't know anything about the type of data the device expects.
To make a useful-but-not-quite-right analogy, your network interface card knows about how to send 1s and 0s over the net; but it doesn't know anything about what kind of sequences of 1s and 0s will make sense to anything on the other end. Instead, you've got software layers above it that are responsible for taking a bunch of outgoing data and cutting it up into an ordered sequence of chunks wrapped in headers to allow re-assembly (the TCP part), then wrapping them in shipping headers so they'll reach their destination (the IP part), before sending them to the NIC. But even those software layers don't know that the device on the other end will be passing this data to a web browser; so the chunk of data being sent better look like sensible HTML. That's taken care of by other layers of software in user space.
In Linux, kernel modules handle the communication with the device; but they don't know (and don't care) what form the device is expecting the data to be in. For printers, that's handled by a separate "filter" layer that comes before the kernel modules do their work. The filter layer is typically some sort of translation program that runs in userspace, takes a stream of data as input (from a file, from another program, or whatever), and encodes it into some other form and/or breaks it into chunks and/or wraps it in headers. The "encoding into some other form" would include putting in the stuff that exploits specific printer features. It's these filters which are sometimes missing or feature-incomplete in Linux, and are what people refer to when they talk about printer drivers.
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Ok, so they go do some non-bit-banging code for a bit just to keep themselves limber while they're waiting for a "kernel programming problem" to fall in their lap.
Is that flamebait? Anyway, these are people we are talking about. They aren't volunteers. They probably all have job contracts, that they signed and agreed to work on the kernel. Asking them to work on something else is unfair, and why would they want to? You seem to think that programming one thing is the same as programming any other. For example, say you work in an office, doing sales, and the boss tells you that you're gonna work in marketing for a while. Is that okay with you? It's probably not, if yo
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They understand it when they hire you, but three months later they need a "senior developer" and they re-org you on to a team they would never hire you for.
It's just crazy.
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you are not allowed to consult with the customers (That's a BA) (and you are not allowed to talk to the people that talk directly to customers very often either).
writing the specification (That's the designer or architect)
getting the specification approved (Project Manager)
user-interface testing (Okay maybe you except at super large companies)
load-testing (ITQA, or not done because too expensive)
support and maintenenance for the life-cycle of the project (usually hande
Re:First (Score:4, Insightful)
What a pompous tagline...."many developers, few challenges"
TFA says it really clearly. They have 300 developers lined up and 6 devices submitted for driver development.
then a disclaimer that they can't be bothered to work on the MAJOR printer driver issue (*cough--Lexmark--cough*) because printing takes place "in userspace"?
These are KERNEL driver developers. A completely different skillset. They say that very clearly on the wiki, and even provide a link to the printer driver project for the Google-challenged.
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Its kinda like (as far as car analogies go) finding the car industry has the researchers to discover amazing millage and horsepower then we have ever had, but telling the consumers we don't make their kind of car. Just sayin....
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These guys are kernel devs. There are different projects for other hardware.
If Lexmark takes it's printer specs to the CUPS guys, they'll have their printers supported. If Canon takes their scanner specs to the SANE guys, they'll have their scanner supported.
That option has always been there. The kernel guys are just the ones out there promoting the support this time.
The real problem people are running into here is
User space defined (Score:5, Informative)
Linux is a kernel. Almost every other program running on a Linux-based system, be it GNU/Linux or uClinux, is an application running in user space [wikipedia.org], a part of memory separate from "kernel space". The drivers for printers are "filters" for an application called CUPS [wikipedia.org], the drivers for scanners are modules for an application called SANE [wikipedia.org], and the drivers for video cards are modules for an application called X.Org X11 [wikipedia.org].
The people who made this request for proposals are interested in projects that need specific support from kernel space. The kernel side of scanning and printing is solved through libusb.
Re:User space defined (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can't find one with the quality and price that you're looking for you are doing something seriously wrong.
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If someone would compile such a list, by actually testing the hardware in question instead of relying on forum posts of five-minute experts claiming, "It works for me, right out of the box," that in and of itself would be a huge service to the community. And maybe some re
Re:User space defined (Score:4, Informative)
*shameless plug* I happen to have created such a wiki, though it isn't yet as active as I would like: http://www.hardware-wiki.com/ [hardware-wiki.com]
LDP (Score:4, Informative)
Re:User space defined (Score:5, Informative)
http://hplip.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
What more could you ask for?
Re:First (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux is a kernel (Score:2)
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Would you prefer printer drivers being in the kernel?
There are already appropriate projects which handle the bits which the kernel driver team are excluding.
Dont have a supported printer? Talk to the CUPS guys.
I can see where the fustration and confusion is coming from.
I just dont agree with it at all. These guys are kernel developers not CUPS or SANE developers.
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Writing code for a kernel takes a completely different skill set than required for writing printer drivers, etc.
Notably, libusb supports reading and writing arbitrary data to arbitrary USB devices. If libusb can see it, no [i]kernel[/i] driver is needed, that would be duplicated (wasted) time, effort, and resources.
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I'm curious. Where are you when all the stories saying linux is better/faster/more stable than windows get posted? Or when people bitch about DRM preventing them from playing mp3s on linux? I would think that when people are talking about LINUX THE KERNEL doing things that LINUX THE KERNEL clearly can't do, you'd want to be right there fighting the good fight. On the other hand LINUX THE KERNEL is nothing compared to even the shittiest versions of Windows or even DOS. I mean a particular arrangement of bits on a hard drive that is entirely unable to load itself into memory, or even create a filesystem in the first place, is entirely useless and valueless.
Or do you only turn into a pedantic snobbish asshat when it's convenient to dodge criticism of your preciousssss.... preciousssss...
Yes, this is off topic and perhaps a bit of flame bait, but the entire loser crowd who jumps in and declares that linux is just a kernel whenever anyone says anything slightly critical of "linux", is tired and pathetic.
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Well, the issue here is that what "everyone else" thinks is wrong. LINUX IS THE KERNEL. Period. End of story.
We-ell, language is a living, breathing, evolving thing see.
Do you refuse to use the term Xeroxing, except when making paper copies using a machine developed by Xerox?
If the entire world outside of the Linux kernel developers are referring to the entire distro when they say Linux, refusing to acknowledge this won't do anyone any good. It certainly won't work in favor of broader Linux adoption and acceptance.
I doubt you'll be able to educate the world, so you might as well get with the hip new lingo.
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What a pompous tagline...."many developers, few challenges" (or however they're trying to pitch it) and then a disclaimer that they can't be bothered to work on the MAJOR printer driver issue (*cough--Lexmark--cough*) because printing takes place "in userspace"? What the hell does that even mean?
Lets just start with what the hell the drivers are in userspace means. It means they are not part of the kernel, do not use the kernel API, and kernel developers would not necessarily have the skillset to develop them. These people are about as qualified to write printer drivers as New York City firefighters are trained to handle the California Brush fires.
Now the firefighter analogy goes leads nicely into the second issue, different areas of control. Those in charge of the kernel and those in charge of
Re:First (Score:4, Insightful)
If the brush is burning and the official fire departments aren't working on it, a New York City firefighter would be a damn good backup. I think the people here are overstating the whole kernel vs. userspace dichotomy; we're not talking about a plumber trying to rewire an electrical system. The skillsets aren't that far away from each other.
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I haven't been really impressed with the ALSA project's driver support, either. But it's probably not for lack of interested developers.
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Bribery? Citation needed (Score:2)
Parallel tape drives support... (Score:2)
Linux support? (Score:5, Funny)
Pretty much any Windows PC, I'd say.
Ha ha (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I mean drivers that support 3d acceleration, and docking and undocking, and xrandr, and xv, and suspend to RAM, and power management, all without crashing. I've been waiting for years.
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Re:Ha ha (Score:5, Insightful)
The kernel already supports direct access to video cards with DRI. It's up to the X.org / X11 folks to get the "language" the card speaks right and talk to it through DRI.
These guys might be able to write a kernel in their sleep, but completely unfamiliar with the layout, architecture, nuances, and conventions used in the X system.
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310 developers? (Score:3, Insightful)
DPMS support (Score:3, Interesting)
Editing the xorg.conf and tell bullshit about frequency ranges to get 1024x768 85Hz gets boring. Also PCs with improperly blanked screens aren't a rare sight. There are many computers labs full of them at the university (X terminals, diskless VIA C3 PC with 17" CRT), wasting a ridiculous amount of energy displaying black rather than being stand by. That should be urgently fixed.
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Yes! Get power management to work! (Score:5, Insightful)
Having the ability to quickly suspend my machine and bring it up again is extremely high on the list of priorities.
Re:Yes! Get power management to work! (Score:4, Funny)
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Fortunately
X-Fi, ATI graphics cards, wireless cards (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, sound cards that support Dolby Digital Live hardware encoding. For that matter, it'd be nice if AC3 encoding worked well with alsa. Pretty gimpy last I tried it.
Audio and MIDI hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, Presonus Firebox and Firepod. Not just support but proper latency support I guess ( if I can so bold to demand them )
The USB keyboards ( like M-Audio keystations and others ).
It would be really sweet to work on audio in Linux for us CS geeks ( write scripts for audio effects rather than knobs and bars in weird custom interfaces ).
Broadcom wireless cards (Score:5, Insightful)
Webcams, Wifi cards and clean up messes (Score:3, Informative)
What's dreadfully bad about webcams is that even with the same model number/name you can end up with a completely different bridge or sensor chip inside either due to a revision change or locality, really, it's pot luck at best.
As for wifi cards, it's really more of a situation where a few of the current drivers are incredibly fickle - perhaps it's the nature of the beast? I've got a RT2400 type card which if it doesn't get its setup parameters within ~2 seconds of the module being loaded it utterly refuses to accept anything else until a complete restart. Things like that make me feel like I'm playing in Windows again.
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Webcam Drivers (Score:2)
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That's sad.
Re:Webcam Drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
You see, nobody *cares*. They don't understand the first thing about kernel space and user space. They've never *heard* of it, don't know what it is, and couldn't give a rat's ass about some fancy "ring zero".
This seems to come as a surprise to many Linux advocates, but they just want their recently purchased device to work. They want that shiny new game they just picked up at Best Buy to run. They want it to play those online streaming movies from Netflix! If it doesn't, then Linux is useless to them, and they'll keep using Windows. You have to solve people's *actual problems*, not make their eyes glaze over with details they don't care about.
If Toyota was selling cars that worked, but the Honda cars wouldn't start and wouldn't run on any of the fuels sold by the corner gas station, it wouldn't matter at all if the Honda engineers could talk a good line about the skillset needed to design the pistons being different than the skillset needed to design the brake rotors. Nobody would want the cars! That's the position Linux is in now in the desktop, and until this attitude disappears, it always will be in that position.
You want Joe Sixpack to adopt Linux? Make it work with his hardware and his software. Make it seamless, so when he goes to Netflix the online play "just works". No excuses, no "but...", or "you don't understand that...", or "netflix needs to...". Nobody *cares*. Just make the damn thing work! If that is too hard to do, then Linux will never compete with Windows. It has to work for the things real people really do, not just for the l33t hackers who live to type arcane commands into bash prompts.
This is why the human race deserves to be extinct (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's how to get rid of botnets: license computer users. If you don't know enough about the technology to keep from harming the rest of society, you don't get to use it. If you can't keep your computer secure, you get to use snailmail, POTS and get your videos at Blockbuster.
Quit making excuses for people who don't want to learn how their computers work. They are the cause of may of the problems that people who want to use appropriately
When I got my first net access in 1988, the ISP owner interviewed me personally to make sure I'd use the resources responsibly. We should go back to that.
Don't make excuses for idiots. If Joe Sixpack doesn't want to learn how his computer works, take away his keyboard.
Re:Webcam Drivers (Score:4, Insightful)
Some companies are coming around, HP, Intel, AMD. But many are not and that's not the fault of Linux developers - especially if the companies keep their interfaces "super seekrit" requiring a massive reverse engineering effort just to get minimal functionality.
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Linux often breaks compatibility for old drivers. Kernel APIs change and Linux has a very poor history of maintaining backwards compatibility for binary drivers. Companies that have tried to go down this path have quickly found they need to release MANY different version of the driver for differ
Full Support (Score:5, Insightful)
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Lexmark has locked me into windows. (Score:2)
The only other thing I've encountered that I'd like better Linux support for is my webcam-- a Logitech Quickcam STX. It works in Linux, but the drivers it uses are inferior to the ones that I've got on my Windows install-- at least, I believe that would be the fault of the drivers.
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PC532 (Score:3, Funny)
Kernel/Userspace (Score:2, Insightful)
Wireless (Score:5, Interesting)
The current driver space for wireless components in Linux is an odd hodge-podge of ndiswrapper, madwifi (two versions), beta drivers external to the mainline kernel, minimal built-in support and blind luck. Cleaning this up should keep a good number of people very busy.
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I have a suggestion... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, This is a great service. Just pick something that doesn't have X, be it firmware, a driver stack, whatever it may be and just start coding. I am serious, pick a random box at some store and start working. Look at the Sunday flyer, what is being put on sale. Find one of those devices and if it does not have linux support, buy it, start working on it.
Why do you need to wait around for manufacturers to give you devices? Find what people can and will be buying and start supporting that first, the stuff that won't come out for a year doesn't matter if I can't go in a buy a 802.11n card now and get it to work. And if it doesn't support WPA2, I don't want to hear it, go back to your desk and do it over. I want to see the work this time. No doing it in your head.
NDIS is not an option, it is not debuggable or portable across architectures. I have a few PPC machines I would like to use a 802.11n USB network card with.
How about any Broadcom wifi card, with firmware so the driver can be stabilized better than their engineers can.
Just because you don't like how hard it will be shouldn't keep you from starting on it.
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Linux Device Driver Dev: "Hey, I need something to work on."
Me: "Wifi drivers for 802.11n, WPA2 and Broadcom chipsets."
LDDD: "Something besides those."
Me: "Get lost and stop wasting my time."
Stabilize the API (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm maintaining a driver for a bus adapter interface (for connecting old minicomputer peripherals to PCs) and it's a much bigger time sink than it needs to be. The source code is on my web site, but the users are, well, USERS, so when a new kernel release breaks it they just chuck it back at me to fix. So much for open source taking care of itself by magic. I won't bother submitting this driver to the free driver project because it's kind of useless without the $3000 piece of hardware it works with (and that's not counting the crates full of minicomputer hardware needed for testing). I need mine and I don't picture these folks buying their own no matter how much they care.
Anyway I understand why Linus needs the freedom to get better ideas in the future and doesn't want to be weighed down with tons of backwards-compatibility stuff, but I still think it would make Linux more useful to split the difference and occasionally define an interface (doesn't have to be the default as long as you can ask for it somehow) which is guaranteed to work for some number of years. Then flush it at the end but at least some large amount of rarely-used stuff worked OK in the mean time, w/o having to be rewritten
OK so I'm still stinging from udev. Sure, it's cute. But it required driver hacking (yet again) *and* broke my user-mode application by changing some of the device names. That would be OK back in kernel 0.x days but this is way too late in Linux history to start breaking applications, and after 16-17 years it's really time for the external interface to the kernel to start quieting down too.
Re:Stabilize the API (Score:5, Interesting)
I seem to recall that one of the main kernel developers said they accept any drivers, and had a driver in the kernel with only a single known user. So it seems to me that they would accept your driver, since you seem to have many users.
If you get your driver in the kernel then I assume the developers who change the interfaces would update your code automatically.
Intel Intergrated Graphics (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be nice to put all those old boxes to use.
Kernel vs. Userspace (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a user. I have a printer/GPU/whatever. It doesn't work on my Linux-running machine. I don't know or care whether it's a userspace or kernel issue. Heck, I don't even know the difference between the two. Hell, my only association with the word "kernel" is "the part of the nut that you eat", and all the word "userspace" reminds me of that I really should try and get a bigger cubicle. I just want my friggin' printer to work! And as far as I know, either Linux (and to me Linux refers to the WHOLE GNU/Linux suit) either DOES it or it DOESN'T.
If there are too many kernel programmers for the kernel problems to solve, then maybe more should try to specialize in userspace drivers, or whatever happens to be the problem that currently needs to be solved (and PLEASE don't get started about how "they don't get paid so don't tell them what to do", because all you do is reinforce MS's primary argument to "why Linux isn't as good as Windoze").
I like Linux as much as the next geek, but unlike the Fundamentalist Linuxist (who will undoubtedly mod me down as Troll for my insolent heresy towards the Sanctity of the Linux Kernel) I keep my eyes open about issues from the perspective of those who need those issues fixed, not in the Ivory Tower of Theoretical Separation of Kernel and User Space on which far too many people are sitting).
You are not a troll, just clueless (Score:5, Insightful)
The seperation between kernelspace and userland is NOT theoretical. This is slashdot and it would be like saying that the people who worked on your cars powertrain should fix the issues with the electrical subsystem. It then offcourse becomes obvious why this is idiotic, people who know engines don't need to know anything about electricity, yes both are "power" but at the same time totally different.
The kernels task is to provide the base system that other software can then use to run on. You really don't want to tie to much stuff into the kernel, and if possible migrate stuff OUT of it and keep only the bare fundementals inside. Why? Windows is an excellent reason why. If the kernel crashes your are fucked, if a userspace program crashes, then you just restart that program while the kernel goes on.
Take printers, the kernel does the USB protocol, but CUPS talks to the printer. The kernel handles the AGP bus, but is X11 that does the video work. Therefore the drivers for your printer and video card need to be part of these later projects. Offcourse it gets confusing with video cards because they ALSO need to be part of the kernel.
Say you call up the electricity company to complain your PC don't work, they are very nice and send an engineer over. He will check the outlet, confirm it supplies the proper current and then leave. Your PC still don't work? Not his problem, not his job and most important, he may very well not even know where to start. Call Dell instead.
Cups is a totally different project with its own team of people and own goals and ambition. To say that a kernel developer should just switch to that project instead is starting to smell a lot like extreme arrogance from your part. Who are you to say what an other person should do?
People often start speaking of elitism, but what do you call it when a person like you expects everyone else to jump at their demands?
The strength of Linux comes from its volunteers, who work hard on the stuff they are passionate about. Sadly there are also weaknesses in this which according to the reactions so far seem to be, don't buy Lexmark. I can live with that, if you can't. Well there is a small company called Microsoft operating out of Redmond. YOu might want to give them a call, I am sure they will JUMP at the change to develop drivers specifically for your hardware needs.
Oh but wait. MS doesn't do that does it. Does MS provide code to run old software that don't wanna run on their latests OS? No. Does it provide drivers for hardware that has problems? No.
Odd, that you are so undemanding of a product you pay for, but think volunteers should be at your beg and call.
Next time something don't work, blame the company you paid for it.
OK you guys can pack up now ;) (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile a fair number of us need:
1) RAID monitoring tools (bad to have a RAID system but no way to know if a drive has failed)
2) Temperature/fan/etc sensor monitoring.
3) did I hear one or two mentioning printer drivers?
4) Video drivers.
5) Sound drivers.
6) NIC drivers.
7) Virtualization hardware stuff.
The problem I see is for a fair number of these is you might actually have "drivers" (I use the term loosely) for say RHEL4, but not for RHEL3, Ubuntu or OpenSUSE, or whatever.
The main problem I suppose is hardware companies not wanting to cooperate in ways that the Linux people want.
But with 32 bit Windows, you can typically use the same drivers from Win2K onwards at least until that crap called Vista. Whereas with Linux, there's a fair chance that a kernel update would break something.
Just one (Score:3, Insightful)
Things like ACPI, internal modems, infrared ports and card readers should work just like we see in the operating system with the four-colour-flag.
High Definition Audio, Wifi, ATI graphics (Score:3, Informative)
Can I BUY an open-source driver? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Only the best! (Score:5, Informative)
- Printers (CUPS)
- Scanners (SANE)
- Cameras (gPhoto2)
Devices that use kernelspace USB drivers:
- USB Mass storage (card readers/pendrives/media players/etc)
- USB Networking
- USB Bluetooth
- USB to serial/parallel converters
- USB HID Input
- USB Audio
- USB Video Capture
That USB devices are a userspace issue is a lie. They go both ways.
Besides, Trance Vibrator support is already in... the kernel.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
And watch the card get discontinued (Score:2)
If the kernel devs choose just one [video] card range and reverse-engineer the thing already
Video cards are primarily the job of X.org developers, not Linux developers.
there'd be a clear signal to buy that card if you want a hassle-free 3D accelerated Linux kernel experience.
A completely reverse-engineered card would also be a clear signal to the manufacturer that it should discontinue production of that card model if it wants the alleged gag money from Microsoft to keep flowing. Besides, it would likely take so long to reverse-engineer a 3D video card to a level on par with DirectX 9 that the card would be long obsolete and out of production anyway.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I suppose there could be some minor difference between the version that causes yours to break, but my Radeon 9200 SE works just fine. After tweaking the xorg.conf settings I even got the open source ATI driver in xorg to play nice with compositing. Mind you, I rarely use it for anything really fancy, so I guess there could be issues I'm not aware off, and as always, that it works for me doesn't preclude it from being absolutely broken for you.
Re:iPods? (Score:4, Informative)