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On Jan 31, 2007, at 12:26 AM, Greg KH wrote: > On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 06:27:29PM -0800, Michael K. Edwards wrote: >> On 1/29/07, Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> wrote: >>> Free Linux Driver Development! >>> >>> Yes, that's right, the Linux kernel community is offering all >>> companies >>> free Linux driver development. ... >> [snip] >>> [1] for the CPUs that support the bus types that your device >>> works on. >> >> Bravo! Now, is there a message in the same spirit that can be >> tailored to embedded space, especially to SoC vendors and (even more >> importantly) their customers? Something along the lines of: >> >> "We understand that embedded hardware is frequently buggy and that >> SoC >> vendors are doing well if their own internal software people can get >> enough help from the chip guys to bring up enough customer-driven use >> cases to win a few design-ins. >> >> We sympathize with embedded developers who stay up nights with an >> O-scope and a JTAG emulator reverse-engineering the hardware >> behavior, >> trying to figure out which this order of operations works and this >> other one doesn't. >> >> We have the software tools and the competence to quantify the >> potential gains from current toolchains and kernels, aggressive >> compilation options, and in-tree power/latency management strategies, >> so that you can build a business case against "fire and forget" SDKs >> based on ancient compilers, obsolete kernels, and unmaintained >> out-of-tree patches. >> >> We will help platform integrators bridge the gap between the chip >> architects' claims about device performance and the condition in >> which >> the BSP guys toss drivers over the fence. >> >> You can hang onto the hardware and profit from coaching and code >> review, or you can send us a board and whatever doco you've got, and >> we'll figure it out. >> >> All we ask is that 1) SoC vendors authorize customers to do an NDA >> with OSDL and pass vendor NDA material along to us; 2) when the >> product ships, all participants are free to exercise GPL rights with >> respect to the chip support and driver code produced; and 3) platform >> integrators cooperate with the rework usually needed as code merges >> towards Linus's tree." >> >> Or is this a pipe dream? > > Oh, I would love to see something like that happen :) > > As I come from an embedded background, I love to see Linux running in > tiny systems. So anything I can do to help out with that I'd love to > offer. > > But being able to read the minds of SOC hardwre engineers and > decode all > of the documentation errors they produce is enough to drive one crazy, > my condolences go out to everyone in that situation... > > good luck, > > greg k-h Thanks. It gets even better when they change things between revisions of the same HW block. Out of interest are you was this geared to any particular SoC's/ architectures? - k - 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/ | ||||||||||
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