Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 8th Apr 2008 12:40 UTC, submitted by SEJeff
Here's an update on the Linux Driver Project. "The Linux Driver Project is alive and well, with over 300 developers wanting to participate, many drivers already written and accepted into the Linux kernel tree, and many more being currently developed. The main problem is a lack of projects. It turns out that there really isn't much hardware that Linux doesn't already support. Almost all new hardware produced is coming with a Linux driver already written by the company, or by the community with help from the company. There are two main classes of hardware, video input devices and wireless network cards, that is not well supported by Linux, but large efforts are already underway to resolve this issue, with the wireless driver issue pretty much taken care of already, however there are a few notable exceptions. Because of this, our main effort has turned into one of education. Educating vendors of how to become members of the Linux kernel community, proper coding standards and procedures, and how to get their code into the kernel tree."
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Member since:
2006-06-22
If you read the full article it talks specifically about broadcom. Drivers for broadcom hardware are reverse engineered because the company makes no effort to support kernel.org.
""There are still some wireless vendors that do not provide Linux support directly. Two of these, Atheros and Broadcom have drivers created by the community through reverse engineering efforts. These drivers usually lag the introduction of the hardware by a number of months due to the lack of vendor support.""
Given that most drivers nolonger need to be reverse engineered, ("for almost all modern hardware devices, [reverse engineering] is not necessary.") if you read between the lines you can infer that quality will obviously lag as well.