Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Linux drivers management | From | Alan Cox <> | Date | Wed, 08 Feb 2006 01:06:03 +0000 |
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On Mer, 2006-02-08 at 03:45 +0800, David Chow wrote: > Community Developers and Maintainers: > - Look at the matter on community development process, programming > - Chase for performance, optimization in source level, even though it is > difficult to maintain, who cares?
I've done real studies on this. The majority of the kernel interfaces favour simplicity and independance.
> - Willing to maintain and develop drivers for free, even though they > don't work for the hardware vendor.
Most of our drivers are maintained by people with economic incentives to maintain them. Economic incentives are not always cash and employment.
> - We will follow the convention who make changes to the API will have to > patch all the mess in the kernel source, even though there are 3,714,234 > hardware peripheral drivers in the kernel in year 2012, I am happy to do > that :) . Because I want to make change and following the convention. > (how much time to make change or test?)
I'd beg to differ. The amount of hardware interfaces in a system that are non standard has been dropping like a stone. Software is *expensive* and it is getting cheaper and cheaper for commodity products to adopt a commodity API, especially in the open source world where pure software pricing scams (eg extra cost for flipping the 'raid enable' bit on a controller) don't work.
The recent directions are pretty clear IDE -> Various interfaces -> AHCI A billion periphals -> USB (EHCI/OHCI/UHCI) + Class drivers SATA -> AHCI Sound -> Intel i810 clones/AC97 USB imaging random drivers -> USB video classes Scanners -> USB video/image classes A billion camera interfaces -> USB storage A load of MP3 player interfaces -> USB storage
Its getting harder and harder to justify non-standard APIs except in a few areas like infinibong and 3D graphics where they can make a product genuinely better. Even RAID cards are drifting inexorably to either extinction or emulating standard interfaces, and no doubt will eventually end up AHCI.
> the community. But strictly speaking, it shouldn't. Please refer to the > process of making a driver from a manufacturers point of view and > consider user using old OS'es which don't want to upgrade.
But those people have a stable API - usually RHEL3, RHEL4, SuSE Enterprise.
> Sure its not going to change, maybe but not in a year or two, but > freedom of speech exists, right?
Time will tell. People said the same when Linux got so big it wouldn't fit on one floppy disk. I can't prove you are wrong but my suspicion is that economic incentives and pressures will mould the development process over time according to the problems it faces.
Alan
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