Return-path: Received: from mail.vyatta.com ([76.74.103.46]:53034 "EHLO mail.vyatta.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932468Ab0KRRXm convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Thu, 18 Nov 2010 12:23:42 -0500 Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 09:23:37 -0800 From: Stephen Hemminger To: "Luis R. Rodriguez" Cc: Greg KH , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-wireless , David Miller , "John W. Linville" , "Perez-Gonzalez, Inaky" , Charles Marker , Jouni Malinen , Kevin Hayes , Zhifeng Cai , Don Breslin , Doug Dahlby , Julia Lawall Subject: Re: Challenges with doing hardware bring up with Linux first Message-ID: <20101118092337.370449e1@nehalam> In-Reply-To: References: <20101118164552.GC2855@kroah.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:53:22 -0800 "Luis R. Rodriguez" wrote: > On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Greg KH 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. --