Re: [Tech-board-discuss] Obtaining hardware for writing Linux drivers?

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Fri, Mar 04, 2011 at 04:23:31PM -0500, Chris Ball wrote:
> Hi TAB folks,
> 
> This is a little bit of a long story.  I'm the upstream MMC maintainer,
> and have started seeing bug reports for a new Realtek card reader that's
> not yet supported in mainline.  Here are some of the bugs:
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/658351 # Dell M301Z
> https://bugs.meego.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2390 # HP Mini Note
> 
> I'd like to fix this by adding mainline support for the device, but it's
> hard to do so without hardware.  I'm sure there's *someone* in the
> kernel community who knows people at Realtek or Dell or HP, one of whom
> could get me access to hardware, but I don't know who that person is.
> 
> I'm thinking that it would be pretty helpful if (a) there was a person
> who actively cultivated vendor contacts for this purpose, and (b) if the
> kernel maintainers all knew who that person was, and that it's okay to
> mail them if you're the maintainer of a driver and need to get hardware
> to test/fix it on.
> 
> Does that make sense?

Yes, completely.

> Could LF be the right group to organize having such a person exist?

I don't see why not.

> In the case of this particular device, I was pointed at Bdale Garbee by
> people on IRC (but wouldn't have known to e-mail him myself) and will
> see if I can get him to help.  But, even assuming he can help me, that
> still doesn't solve the problem in the general case.  Any ideas?

I'd be glad to step up and work on accomplishing this.  But, supposing I
am successful in getting these contacts and keeping them up to date, how
would you recommend that we publicize this type of functionality that we
could now provide?

thanks,

greg k-h