Return-path: Received: from mail-iw0-f174.google.com ([209.85.214.174]:53931 "EHLO mail-iw0-f174.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756675Ab0KRQyf convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Thu, 18 Nov 2010 11:54:35 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20101118164552.GC2855@kroah.com> References: <20101118164552.GC2855@kroah.com> From: "Luis R. Rodriguez" Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:53:22 -0800 Message-ID: Subject: Re: Challenges with doing hardware bring up with Linux first To: Greg KH Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-wireless , David Miller , "John W. Linville" , Stephen Hemminger , "Perez-Gonzalez, Inaky" , Charles Marker , Jouni Malinen , Kevin Hayes , Zhifeng Cai , Don Breslin , Doug Dahlby , Julia Lawall Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: 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