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    SubjectRe: 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
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