Linked by Rahul on Sun 2nd Nov 2008 19:24 UTC
Greg Kroah-Hartman is a longtime developer of the Linux kernel, known for his work maintaining USB drivers. O'Reilly Media recently interviewed Greg about his claim that the Linux kernel now supports more devices than any other operating system ever has, as well as why binary-only drivers are illegal, and how the kernel development process works.
"I went and asked every single hardware manufacturer, the big guys that ship the boxes, Dell, IBM, HP--what do you ship that isn't supported by Linux? They came back with nothing. Everything is supported by Linux. If you have a device that isn't supported by Linux that's being shipped today, let me know.".
If you would like to take up Greg KH on his claim, his email address is greg AT kroah.com
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Member since:
2006-01-17
Greg has good point to why model with binary drivers doesn't work with open source kernel. Or better said, why a driver ABI must be broken sooner or later when developing an OS (so they don't even try to have stable ABI).
For graphic cards, IMHO I like the model that AMD pursues. Opening specs (and somewhat participating in development) while keeping around highly optimized binary driver. For gaming/high-performance stuff you need sort of optimizations that are very specific and special-case in comparison to what goes to open source drivers (especially the kernel part). Those are usually hacks, like e.g detecting and acting for a specific game, which are by order of magnitude harder to implemented in a clean way with proper API abstractions. OSS drivers should have a clean design almost by definition, so they take time to develop, while gamers want speed fixes ASAP.
Opening specs is something Nvidia should do though, like AMD did. nouveau hackers already reverse-engineered a lot of their design, no need to keep it secret any longer.