Messages in this thread | | | From | Roland Dreier <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH, RFC] A development process document | Date | Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:30:58 -0700 |
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> > On the other hand, the drivers for completely new hardware (that has > > been totally unsupported by the kernel previously, so there is no > > possibility for introducing regressions) are still allowed even after > > -rc1, right? > > Clearly it's been known to happen (can you say GRU?). But I don't know > that has ever really been adopted as an "official" policy. My > preference would be to lay down the merge window rules as a fairly firm > thing rather than suggest to people that there might be ways to slip > around them sometimes. But, certainly, I'm not tied to that if we want > to send a different message.
I think Linus has said pretty explicitly that he is willing to merge new low-level hardware drivers at pretty much any stage, as long as they are obviously self-contained and can't break anything. As an example of this, the UVC webcam driver was one of the very last things merged just before the final 2.6.26 release, very late in the release cycle.
Obviously there is some judgement involved in what qualifies as new hardware drivers, but Linus also often comes out in favor of thinking about things rather than trying to apply mechanical rules anyway.
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