On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 09:49:30AM -0500, Alex Deucher wrote: > On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 5:21 AM, John Talbut <jt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hi > > > > I suspect the reason why we have two drivers is that Realtek choose to > > develop out of tree drivers instead of collaborating with the kernel > > developers to get proper in kernel drivers. I do not see the logic in their > > doing this, it does the reputation of their company no good and it is more > > trouble for everyone involved. > > Likely they do it because they have an OS abstraction layer and it > allows them to share the same source code between several different > OSes and OS versions. It is a lot of work to have to write and > update multiple versions of a driver for different OSes, especially if > you have limited development resources. It does Linux no good to bad > mouth these companies when they provide working Linux drivers with > source code. What advantage does writing a "native" Linux driver > provide for them other than extra maintenance work? The driver has a chance of working properly that way :) Seriously, "os abstraction layers", don't work well, if at all, in Linux for the long-run as a development model. All of the hardware companies realize this, and are slowly moving away from them, it's just taking some a little bit longer than others. Patience, greg k-h _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://driverdev.linuxdriverproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
