Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 28 Aug 2004 00:26:49 +0200 (MEST) | From | Geert Uytterhoeven <> | Subject | Re: Termination of the Philips Webcam Driver (pwc) |
| |
On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Anton Altaparmakov wrote: > On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Anton Altaparmakov wrote: > > On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > But Greg is right - we don't keep hooks that are there purely for binary > > > drivers. If somebody wants a binary driver, it had better be a whole > > > independent thing - and it won't be distributed with the kernel. > > > > So how come we allow drivers which load binary firmware into the kernel? > > And there are plenty of them... > > > > There isn't very much difference between binary firmware and the binary > > module in this case. Lets see what each of these does: > > > > - binary firmware: protects the intellectual rights of the people who > > designed the chips by not showing anyone how they work by not showing the > > original program code that drives the chips > > > > - binary module at hand: protects the intellectual rights of the people > > who designed the chips by not showing anyone how they work by not > > showing the original program code that drives the extended functionality > > of the chips > > > > Sound simillar? > > > > IMHO they are identical except that the firmware is downloaded to the > > hardware and executed by a different cpu while the binary module is > > executed by the host cpu. > > I was a bit fast, there is the issue of different arhitectures for the > host cpu but if the producers of the binary code care they would produce > the appropriate binary code for each architecture. I do not know if this > is done in this case or not but it certainly is doable...
Not just the different architectures: also different CONFIG options (e.g. SMP vs. UP).
Open Source drivers with binary firmware are `automatically'[*] supported on whatever Linux kernel you want.
Binary-only drivers are supported on one architecture, for one specific kernel version, for one combination of config options.
Although Open Source firmware would be very nice, hardware + firmware can more or less be considered equivalent to ordinary hardware, i.e. the manufacturer _could_ have done everything in hardware. That's similar to CPUs with hardwired logic and CPUs with (programmable) microcode. The firmware has the advantage that you can fix `hardware' bugs without running a new generation of the actual hardware.
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert
[*] Within reasonable constraints.
P.S. Perhaps I sound a bit more permissive than usual, but it's getting late ;-) -- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |