Re: Automatic download and installation of drivers.

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2001 at 09:58:38AM +0200, Tim Jansen wrote:
> > But the main question I have is:
> > 	What is the real problem that you are trying to solve?
> > and
> > 	Why does the current kernel/driver situation not work for you?
> 
> 1. It makes it much easier for a user to find a driver that's not included in 
> his distribution. Linux drivers are usually named after the chipset's name or 
> the first device that was supported. How can a user know that his Logitech 
> Quickcam Pro 3000 needs the pwc (philips webcam) driver? And where can he 
> find the driver?

The current linux-hotplug interface solves this problem.  The driver
itself lets the kernel/world know for what devices it supports.  Coming
from the other direction (what driver supports this device) is just as
easy.  Look at modules.usbmap and modules.pcimap for examples.

> 2. (source driver packages only) right now the situation for drivers authors 
> who want to distribute their drivers to end-users is really bad. Either they 
> make it complicated for their users and distribute the drivers in source 
> form. Even now I would guess the majority of Linux users is not able to 
> compile their own drivers, and hopefully the percentage will be much lower in 
> a couple of years.  Or the driver author provides binary packages for each 
> version of each distribution. It is a lot of work and still won't help all 
> users.  This is probably one of the reasons that so few hardware 
> manufacturers provide Linux drivers.

The solution to this is to either live with the nightmare of supporting
binary packages for _every_ distro kernel release (1 kernel release from
RedHat is 11 kernels, multiply that by different versions of that distro
and the number of different distros, you have a huge mess) or simply put
the driver in the kernel source tree.

By putting the driver into the tree, all the problems go away, users
don't have to compile their own drivers, the drivers are all distributed
by the different Linux vendors, vendors don't have to update their
driver for every kernel api change, and everyone is happy.  Well, the
people who don't like open source drivers aren't happy, but we aren't
here to make their lives easier :)

thanks,

greg k-h

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