Thank you for explaining the overview. I will choose an appropriate model and confirm information of the URLs later. > There are resources available to help you with getting your patches > based on the latest kernel version. There are many ways in which a > company can be involved with supporting their hardware with a fully > supported Linux device driver. > > One model is one where the hardware company employs an engineer who is > actively involved with Linux community and is constantly upgrading and > developing their device driver against the latest kernel, and then > group such as the Driver Backport Workgroup[1] will backport drivers > to various enterprise kernels. Some companies like this model because > they retain control over the development of the device driver, and > they can also update it to support hardware not yet released for sale; > some companies such as Intel and IBM, have been able to use this model > to assure that the latest mainstream kernel has support for a new > version of their hardware device at or before the moment it is > released for sale to the general public. > > Another model is one where the company makes some combination of (1) > hardware specifications, (2) patches against an older kernel, and (3) > hardware available to developers (the Linux Foundation can help > faciliate this), and then a group such as the Linux Driver Project[2] > can help write a driver or port the driver to the latest kernel. This > is done on a volunteer basis, and so how quickly this might happen is > less under the control of the hardware company involved. > > There are many other models in between these two extremes, depending > on how closely the company is willing and interested to work with the > Linux development community. For example, the upstream maintainer may > be a volunteer, who gets free hardware samples (and possibly > occasional contract work) to support the hardware, but the company is > less involved than the "full engagement" model where their engineer is > the primary mainstream developer, and but more involved than the > company dumps some specs, sample code, and some hardware and is > otherwise not involved. > > A general overview of some of the issues involved in why things work > they way they do can be found here [3]. > > Best regards, > > Theodore Y. Ts'o > Chief Technical Officer, Linux Foundation > STSM, IBM Linux Technology Center > Medford, Massachusetts > (617) 245-5616, T/L 930-1182 > (781) 391-2699 (fax) > (781) 526-0121 (cell) > > [1] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/driver-backport > [2] http://www.linuxdriverproject.org/foswiki/bin/view > [3] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/publications/linux-driver-model Thank you for your polite reply again. _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://driverdev.linuxdriverproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
