I've been working on learning how to do Linux Device Driver development so though I am not an expert I might be able to help with some of these questions.
On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 11:26 PM, Michael Robinson <[email protected]> wrote: > I have qc-usb-0.6.6 source code from Sourceforge for my cheap web cam > and it works with the 2.6.10 kernel, but I don't think it works with any > later 2.6.x kernel. On the ReactOS forums, it has been suggested that > Linux lacks a coherent driver model so that every driver has to be > ported every time a new kernel comes out. Is this true? It has been > suggested that Linux doesn't do well with proprietary drivers from one > kernel to the next. I have yet to see ReactOS use anything that Linux > can't use without crashing, so maybe the ReactOS community is being a > bit premature to be knocking Linux. Because there became a USB standard for webcam interfaces most newer webcams can just use a generic driver. This killed most of the incentive to write drivers for webcams because it was easier to just go get a random new camera at the store than to spend many hours figuring out how to reverse engineer the proprietary protocol of some random old camera. That said one person personally made Linux drivers for over 100 webcams, but these never made it into the mainline kernel because the code needed too much cleanup to be considered high enough quality to be part of the official sources. Ubuntu decided to add them anyways for the sake of making peoples lives easier, but because they didn't make it into the mainline kernel if some change upstream broke a webcam driver it probably didn't get fixed. > On my PII system with the built in ISA sound card, > I found that turning the Monorail 3D Audio on causes Slackware to crash > during boot. Turn the audio off in the bios, Slackware boots like a > charm. Why did Monorail integrate junk into an otherwise decent Pentium > II motherboard? Why didn't they integrate a standard sound blaster? I think I only ever saw one motherboard that included a sound blaster on board. I think it cost something like $700 when it came out in 1998. > Where is the Linux kernel going in the future as far as drivers are > concerned? It seems right now like a lot of stuff is broken. I > hate to see stuff break between an old release in the current > stable kernel series and a newer release in that series. > > I guess it is a lot to ask that someone fix the driver for an ISA sound > card since ISA has been gone a long time. ISA was always a mess as there is no way to safely, and consistently verify that the card installed matches the driver you are trying to use. You pretty much have to manually configure it. PCI, and USB don't have this problem as the spec has a way to ask the hardware what it is. > Concerning hardware not working with Linux. Say I know an EE and know > about a business that could potentially make PCI cards. Is it possible > to make say sound cards and release the design without defeating one's > opportunity to profit from the work? Is releasing a hardware schematic > with the hardware under a license that says, "you are not permitted to > use these schematics to build the hardware without explicit permission > from the manufacturer," a reasonable way to do business? If the > schematics to popular hardware exist and are free for the owners of said > hardware, someone will probably write a Linux driver for it. For that > matter, someone may write a driver for Syllable, Haiku, Freedos, > etcetera. There is a open hardware project for graphics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Graphics_Project With graphics there is the additional problem of even if you design the circuit board the chips themselves may not have documentation. Though many electrical engineers could design a decent sound card. There are many Digital signal processors, Analog to Digital, Digital to Analog, and opamps on the the market. Sound card driver problems have more to do with the complexity of what they could potentially do. With many inputs, and outputs, digital encodings, and effects that could be applied in a rats nest of patching inputs through effects, and then to outputs. It's getting there though. Intel has been funding development of Linux drivers for most of their products. Wifi, Ethernet, Graphics, and USB. The first USB 3.0 driver is the Linux one making it a major technology where Linux was actually leading the way instead of playing catch up. Written by Portland resident, and intel employee Sarah Sharp. -- teknotus Take Notice (503) 409-1735 _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
