linux-kernel - Re: Challenges with doing hardware bring up with Linux first

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Date:	Thu, 18 Nov 2010 09:23:37 -0800
From:	Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@...tta.com>
To:	"Luis R. Rodriguez" <lrodriguez@...eros.com>
Cc:	Greg KH <greg@...ah.com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-wireless <linux-wireless@...r.kernel.org>,
	David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>,
	"John W. Linville" <linville@...driver.com>,
	"Perez-Gonzalez, Inaky" <inaky.perez-gonzalez@...el.com>,
	Charles Marker <Charles.Marker@...eros.com>,
	Jouni Malinen <Jouni.Malinen@...eros.com>,
	Kevin Hayes <kevin@...eros.com>,
	Zhifeng Cai <zhifeng.cai@...eros.com>,
	Don Breslin <Don.Breslin@...eros.com>,
	Doug Dahlby <Doug.Dahlby@...eros.com>,
	Julia Lawall <julia@...u.dk>
Subject: Re: Challenges with doing hardware bring up with Linux first

On Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:53:22 -0800
"Luis R. Rodriguez" <lrodriguez@...eros.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Greg KH <greg@...ah.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 12:46:37AM -0800, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
> >> Can Linux help in any way? What if we used staging for a common driver
> >> architecture for different OSes? Most of those staging drivers already
> >> have some sort of OS agnostic cruft, why not try to help hardware
> >> vendors by providing them with a common OS agnostic solution they can
> >> share? Is this not out turf? If its not, are we perfectly OK in being
> >> second citizens so long as the driver eventually gets done on proper
> >> upstream Linux ? I'm not OK with it and hence my e-mail. I'm looking
> >> for ideas and thoughts on this. Please no trolls, would really just
> >> like some constructive discussions on this. As I see it maybe we can
> >> move some of this OS agnostic crap into staging, and then use spatch
> >> to write tools to de-unwrap crap to Linux specific stuff and help
> >> maintain it. What this does is it moves OS agnostic crap out as a
> >> community effort to help aid proper development and porting for Linux.
> >> Since we'd maintain the crap / scripts / de-wrappers, we'd likely be
> >> able to get drivers quicker and can have a framework to help companies
> >> who still [1] need to support other Operating Systems.
> >
> > No, staging is for gettingn code into, or out of, the kernel tree, not
> > for anything else.
> >
> > I have allowed it to be used to hold drivers in that are not
> > "acceptable", while another driver was written by others from scratch to
> > work properly on that hardware, and then the original one is dropped.
> > That's ok, as there is a time-limit on how long the code lives in the
> > staging tree.
> >
> > But to try to use it to create a multi-os solution, no, that's not what
> > staging is for.
> 
> OK thanks!
> 
> > Also, please review the past multi-os driver initiatives that have
> > sprung up over the years (about 1 every 10 years it seems).  Please
> > learn from the past as to why those have failed every single time, and
> > why we don't want to even try to do that again.
> 
> :-) thanks, just testing waters to see what's possible and what
> direction to focus more on.
> 
>   Luis

If you go back to the Mythical Man Month you will find:
 "Plan on doing it twice; you are going to anyway"

Therefore I wouldn't worry about whether the first development version
is upstream.

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