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:2005-07-06
Well, I would say, how many devices you support, does matter to a good extend but as the article notes, for a large majority, the drivers do work very well.
There's support and there's support. My laptop for example is technically fully supported, with open source drivers even, for all its features. Basically it is possible to get everything to work, that however doesn't mean it's easy to get working.
To get my fully supported laptop fully working I had to edit several files in /etc, download and compile the latest version of some driver that hadn't made it into my distros repository, cut and paste several scripts from several different web sites, change some of those script to fit my configuration and then edit a couple of more files, based on information from yet another third party site. Once that was done everything worked, more or less.
Compare this to Windows. I install Windows, go to the laptop manufacturers website, download the relevant packages for my laptop, double click those packages, hit Continue a couple of times, reboot and everything works.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Well, I would say, how many devices you support, does matter to a good extend but as the article notes, for a large majority, the drivers do work very well.
For gpsca webcam driver, I wrote to Greg KH and Hans from Fedora started working on it as well, so not only is the driver in the latest upstream kernel, in Fedora 10, we also include a libv4l library that supports all the webcams using their own custom formats as well.
http://lwn.net/Articles/287910/
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/BetterWebcamSupport
Still doesn't take away some of the pain points of proprietary drivers (Nvidia is the last major offender there) and proprietary firmware ( Broadcom is a pain because they are not even redistributable) and many others but overall the situation is getting very much better. It is interesting to see the industry turn around.