From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751953AbXA3Wuy (ORCPT ); Tue, 30 Jan 2007 17:50:54 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751955AbXA3Wux (ORCPT ); Tue, 30 Jan 2007 17:50:53 -0500 Received: from sj-iport-4.cisco.com ([171.68.10.86]:21794 "EHLO sj-iport-4.cisco.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751953AbXA3Wuw (ORCPT ); Tue, 30 Jan 2007 17:50:52 -0500 X-IronPort-AV: i="4.13,259,1167638400"; d="scan'208"; a="36146010:sNHT1664041887" To: Jeff Garzik Cc: Greg KH , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Free Linux Driver Development! X-Message-Flag: Warning: May contain useful information References: <20070130012904.GA9617@kroah.com> <20070130191020.GF20642@kroah.com> <20070130195445.GE22022@kroah.com> <45BFC7F2.7090209@garzik.org> From: Roland Dreier Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 14:50:49 -0800 In-Reply-To: <45BFC7F2.7090209@garzik.org> (Jeff Garzik's message of "Tue, 30 Jan 2007 17:34:26 -0500") Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.1007 (Gnus v5.10.7) XEmacs/21.4.19 (linux) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-OriginalArrivalTime: 30 Jan 2007 22:50:49.0523 (UTC) FILETIME=[1633F830:01C744C1] Authentication-Results: sj-dkim-8; header.From=rdreier@cisco.com; dkim=pass ( sig from cisco.com/sjdkim8002 verified; ); Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org > Which of these actively maintained and supported drivers work on only > one platform[1], and are excluded from enterprise distros? Can we > truly count them as "many", as you repeatedly claim? Why do we restrict this to actively maintained and supported drivers (I think abandonware drivers are highly relevant here...)? And why are you asking about drivers that work on only one platform? Greg promised support for every platform that has the right bus to plug a device into. So things like drivers that don't work on SMP or 64-bit or big-endian platforms also violate that pledge, even if there's more than one 32-bit little-endian uniprocessor platform where the driver does work. Anyway, grepping for stuff like BROKEN or !64BIT or X86 in the Kconfig dependencies under drivers/ finds tons of hits. I don't have time to scan through and figure out which meet your criteria, and I honestly don't know how enterprise distros decide what to support. For example RHEL4 seems to ship aha152x (which depends on ISA && SCSI && !64BIT), but what will RH do if someone actually wants support for it? I don't really understand why it's so hard to accept that sometimes even open specs aren't enough to get great Linux support. - R.