Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Thu, 16 Mar 2000 08:36:08 -0600 | | From | Jim Morris <> | | Subject | Re: 2.3.51 tulip broken |
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Jeff Garzik wrote: > > No one expects anything from you and has not for a long time. If you > wanted to actually WORK on the drivers, rather than just complain, > then I'm sure many people including myself would find that work > very valuable.
Whoa. I think you should simmer down quite a bit right now.
/SOAPBOX ON/ If you've followed the tulip driver development at all, you would know the reasons that the kernel drivers and some of Donald's ethernet drivers have "diverged". I have to side with Donald on a lot of the reasons too. Basically, if he is writing a driver, and want to maintain using a specific structure, that should be his perogative. And I feel that he ought to be able to send something like a complete copy of tulip.c, rather than small incremental patches, if he wants too. In this case, it is Linus who insists on small, incremental patch submission - and that isn't how Donald is setup to work.
Think of it this way: it comes down to semantics. Are drivers like tulip.c standalone development projects, or kernel development? I know you will probably say kernel. But in reality, with the use of modules, that is not necessarily true. The driver runs as a kernel task - but doesn't really have to be part of the kernel source tree, when you get down to it.
In most operating systems, including Linux, it is common for hardware vendors to supply a set of drivers on disk. You then load this driver on the running system to get your hardware to work. Think of the drivers on CESDIS along those lines, and maybe you'll get the picture. I.e. a device driver can be considered a separate peice of software that you load on the system, and not an integral part of the kernel. Including them with the kernel source is a convenience for the end user.
When you get down to it, the Linux source tree is so darned big these days because of all the esoteric device driver support. In some ways it would be nice if there were two trees: a kernel tree, and a device driver tree! ;-)
> I never claimed to be perfect but at least I am trying to fix some > of the the bit-rotten, UNMAINTAINED net driver code currently in > the kernel.
Again - those drivers in the kernel had been modified and patched by various people over the years, via patches sent in to Linus. However, those patches were never sent in to Donald - the maintainer of the original driver. What do you expect him to do? I.e. he's chugging a long on developing a handy-dandy new version of tulip.c or whatever, and the one in the released kernel diverges from it because of patches he doesn't know about.... is he supposed to reverse engineer his own device driver, to get up to date? /SOAPBOX OFF/
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