Hi Alan, Alan DuBoff wrote: > On Mon, 31 Dec 2007, James C. McPherson wrote: > >> What we have with mfi is the situation where LSI's "oh we're really >> truly going to give you this source real soon now" has taken, more >> than 12 months (as far as I'm aware). >> >> How can *any* organisation think that this is useful to the people >> who purchase their kit? > > James, > > I'll eply to your message, there's a bunch of them to wade through in this > thread, but you were the one that derived this as you are somehow related > to submitting some type of ARC case for the author. > > I did find out about the megasas driver, and it's license. > > I also asked my manager if he would reply to this thread, but I think it > is remotely possible that he will, I will pass along what I found out from > him. > > Just before Xmas the agreement was received, signed by LSI to get the > driver putback, and this was about the time this thread started.
I heard that information as well, but from a back-channel and definitely not out in the open, as it were. When it comes to taking delivery of the code from LSI I'm taking a "Doubting Thomas" stance. > The LSI driver is open source, I do not know exactly what license it is > under, but the driver portion is all distributable source. That's another aspect - I've heard that it *could* be under CDDL, and that it might be under some different Open license entirely. Again, until we see the deliverable pieces, it's still a moot point because from an OpenSolaris or even Solaris point of view, it doesn't exist. > There are some > pieces that are not open, but those are the management utilities, and it > is up to Sun/LSI in how those are made available to the community. Since > LSI is the maintainer of those sources, they will most likely have the > biggest say, but I am not clear on how the roles are defined, or who did > the actual work. It is done under contract/nda between Sun/LSI, even > though the driver is being open sourced. > You will see this putback within the next month I'm told, as of just > before Xmas, it is final. Great. I'll keep my eyes peeled for it. >> Whatever distros are out there will *all* have to deal with the >> concept and problem of handling changes which move from one driver >> to another, and how to make that happen in as pain-free a fashion >> as possible. > > I wonder how that will work for more than one of the same driver in open > source? It should be able to handle more than one driver to support a > given device also, and the user should be able to select which one they > use. Or it should be handled by specific distributions in which drivers > they package for a given device, and a distribution could elect to devise > a system that would allow for more than one driver for the same device I > 'spose. That would give the user an alternative driver, in this case the > mfi could be offered along with he megasas driver. As I've mentioned to you before, I've had some ideas about this issue and I'm currently putting them together into a discussion paper which I will be sending out in the next week or two. I don't see this as an insurmountable problem, just one that we haven't had to deal with much (if at all) in Solaris-land. James C. McPherson -- Senior Kernel Software Engineer, Solaris Sun Microsystems http://blogs.sun.com/jmcp http://www.jmcp.homeunix.com/blog _______________________________________________ driver-discuss mailing list driver-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/driver-discuss
