Update On Free Linux Driver Development

Remember the offer Greg Kroah-Hartman made earlier this year, to get Linux drivers written for free for any company that wanted them? Now an anonymous reader points us to an article up on linuxworld with an update to this program. Greg K-H, who leads the development of several kernel subsystems including USB and PCI, admits that the January offer was a bit of "marketing hype" — but says it has brought companies and developers together anyway. Twelve companies have said "yes please," one driver is already in the kernel, and five more are in the pipeline.

Re:so did he write them for free or didn't he

[QuantumG]

the volunteers write them without charging the OEMs, yes.

Mad Propz to van Doorn, Wu and Realtek

[smittyoneeach]

This post brought to you by these two patches, against 2.6.22-rc2:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wireles s.general/2368 [gmane.org]
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wireles s.general/2369 [gmane.org]
The little WG11v2 [netgear.com] is a happy interface. Figure I'll need to stockpile a couple them critters.
Now, how is it that I'm off the hook for managing any of that bad, bad firmware with this wee beastie?
Ivo or Michael, though I'm nowhere near as cool as you dudes, I'll buy you a beverage if I see you in Ottawa next month.
Dunno if GKH's driver program actually helped in this matter, but the general trend in hardware is positive, and I feel Realtek and Netgear deserve a free shill.
Best,
Chris

Modules

[Tharkban]

Modules. Pretty much all drivers are modules and not compiled directly into the kernel. They don't increase the kernel size unless you load them. Although they do increase the kernel source size (in their own files generally) so it is taking a little longer to compile all kernel modules, but that's a price I'm willing to pay for things just working.

Re:Why...

[pembo13]

Then you need to learn how to ask questions better.

Re:Why...

[jZnat]

I believe it's because you mentioned that they are "Two things that a reliable kernel should avoid?" That makes you sound like you know better, so that's the troll-like bit. Also, everyone on /. is assumed to know everything about everything when posting unless said otherwise...

Re:patents, usability

[Anonymous Coward]

CUPS was written long before USB was a twinkle in Intel's eye and behaves like it. I had a Linux box that I used as a print server via CUPS. One printer was LPT, one was USB. The LPT, man, I could turn it off, turn it on, unplug it, send it into the next timezone and bring it back, no problems. If my server went to sleep, still no problems. The USB printer? I had to write a fucking hotplug script for it that removed it from CUPS every time it was disconnected (either unplugged or turned off) and then reinstalled it when it was connected. 4 times out of 10 CUPS freaked out and I had to log into my print server via SSH and dink around at the shell just to get it to work.

Last I heard, the CUPS developers say that's not a bug, that's a feature, but it'll be fixed in the next major release of CUPS due out 2 weeks after Duke Nukem Forever...

Re:Criticism from the peanut gallery

[QuantumG]

The purpose of the OEM getting the driver developer to sign an NDA is so they can just give the developer all their documentation, including stuff they would prefer their competitors never see. If they don't do this, they have to get someone to sit there and go through everything that is being released and censor it. You can't just expect a company to hand over their product secrets so you can write a driver without any assurance that you're not going to immediately sell their documentation to their competitors.

A[n] NDA would be acceptable if it allows you to release fully commented code, i.e. sufficient for anyone to rewrite the driver for any OS or in any language.

And that's exactly what the Software Freedom Law Centre will be requiring from OEMs.. poorly commented code doesn't live long in the kernel tree.

Re:Why...

[jZnat]

If you had said "I think" or "I thought", you wouldn't have sounded like a "knows-better-than-you" kind of person. Linguistics and all that.

Re:Can't copy GPL code?

[QuantumG]

The point of the NDA is so that the OEM can just hand over all their documentation without having to sit down and censor it all so they're not handing over anything that might give their competitors an advantage. They clear the developer to disclose as much information as needed to make a device driver that is well documented and works. They don't clear the developer to turn over the secret algorithms that might be used in the hardware or the production methods that may be of interest to the OEM's competitors.. but they might give that stuff to the developer because it was in the same filing cabinet.

If the driver isn't well written, commented and documented, it will not be accepted into the tree. The NDAs are being drafted by the Software Freedom Law Centre.. you don't think they're going to get the best possible deal?

Otherwise, what would you prefer? Would you prefer the OEM hired a developer to make a binary-only driver? Which they'll stop supporting as soon as it is economically justifiable? Would you prefer they just don't release any drivers for Linux? Don't say you would prefer if they just sat down and wrote perfect developer documentation cause there's no such thing.

Software developers don't need any circuit layouts in the first place, they just need the interface.

Sometimes you do.. sometimes "the interface" just isn't defined and you need to sit there with an osciloscope to figure out what the hell this piece of hardware is doing.. and knowing what line is what kinda helps.

Re:List?

[Zoxed]

> A list of the twelve companies, please?

Maybe this is covered by the NDA mentioned in the article :-)

(Us, no not us: we are a god fearing capitalist company: we would never deal with those commy GPL peeps !)

Not NVIDIA

[elronxenu]

Unfortunately the openness doesn't extend to NVIDIA, who refuse to release specifications or other assistance to developers working on the ULi M920x chipset, which is used for receiving Digital Television.

NVIDIA bought ULi and then cancelled development of the M920x, but you can (still) buy DVB receivers which use this chipset.

Requests for assistance or interface specifications have been refused by NVIDIA.

Re:patents, usability

[ajs318]

You shouldn't need to reboot just to make it detect the printer -- that's Windows thinking! Linux allows you to stop and restart misbehaving subsystems on an individual basis. Just

# /etc/init.d/cups restart

which will stop and restart CUPS, thereby forcing it to reread its configuration files and check for connected devices. (On Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives, it's cupsys not cups). If that doesn't work, try

# modprobe printer

and restart CUPS again. If that makes it work, then

# [ -z `egrep ^[[:space:]]*printer /etc/modules` ] && echo "printer" >> /etc/modules

which will add the appropriate line to /etc/modules, and have it loaded at boot time from next time.

And next time you buy a printer, choose a proper one with PostScript Level 3 in hardware and a built-in Ethernet interface, you cheapskate ;)

answers

[Anonymous Coward]

1) where? you say you've had problems with CUPS and others have complained, but there's nothing about an actualy complaint, just complaining in your OP

2) Ubuntu's problem, not CUPS most likely

3) Admin functions are disabled because you're supposed to log in as administrator. IIRC you can have that as your normal login account, but it's just "log in" to the CUPS webpage (there's a "login" option, which should have sparked the idea off...) as administrator and you have your administration functions available. Unlike windows, this is a multi-user system which uses limited accounts to do some stuff so that a break in one service doesn't break any others: apache having a bug that gives local access does so as user "http", so the damage that can be done is limited to the damage that account can do.

4) This happens with Windows too, if you don't use the Brother install CD to set up your printer. You click on "Brother" in the printer drivers and see a huge list of Brother printers, none of which say 1440 Laser. So you try another brother laser. low res. Another crashes and eventually you find that "Apple: postscript" works because your printer has postscript (I don't know if your system has, but this happened to me with a laser printer). Why Apple? Because that's what Windows works best with. Don't ask me why. So this isn't a problem with CUPS either. If brother had a "CUPS installer" this would work fine. Just as it does with Windows.

5) This does sound like a bug. Talk to the CUPS people and they'll tell you how to log where it's falling over. They'll be able to work out from that what the problem could be, offer ways to test and/or work around the problem and eventually a fix will be available and you'll be asked to test the fix for them. This is what happened to me when I found a bug in the konqueror renderer (div tags weren't being closed).

Re:The more free drivers, the better

[EsbenMoseHansen]

...free as in beer.

According to the article, free as in GPLv2.

Re:A story which has a happy ending

[Hal_Porter]

Did you read the original comment

The same old problems constantly get revisited when someone looks at something semi-widely accepted and decides the code is too ugly and makes a rewrite that doesn't add anything from the user's point of view but forces them to relearn another system.

Nemosoft wrote a GPL driver which called out to a binary decompressor module. All was OK for a couple of years. Then Greg decided to rip out the callback. So suddenly the camera would only work in 160*120. Nemosoft then asked for the crippled driver to be removed. Greg did. Then Saillard forked the driver and decompiled the decompressor and put it back in the kernel. Nemosoft then complained that the decompiled code was illegal and got it removed from the kernel again.

Each step sounds like a perfect example of what the original poster was complaining about - people keep making changes that cause things to stop working.

Re:List?

[dpilot]

I can't give you a link, but I believe the biggest fuss was over the early Vista drivers for the nVidia 8xxx series. Oops, google is your friend: "NVIDIA responds to complaints about state of Vista drivers" http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070206-8784 .html [arstechnica.com]