Re: Automatic download and installation of drivers.

[Dmitri <dmitri@users.sourceforge.net>]

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Quoting Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>:

> On Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 01:31:17AM +0200, Tim Jansen wrote:
> > 
> > You wouldn't need this in the kernel for automatic downloads. Actually the 
> > idea of automatic downloadable drivers is to provide drivers that are NOT in 
> > the kernel. If the user connects a new device and the system doesn't find a 
> > driver for it it would request one from some server. This server could either 
> > provide a driver itself, based the device's vendor and model id, or forward 
> > the system to the vendor's server which would then try to find one for the 
> > model.
> 
> But how do you resolve all of the previous points I raised about
> compilers,

Just yesterday I had to replace gcc 3.0.1 with old but working
egcs-2.91.66. The C download was just 1.5 MBytes, and C++ was
only 1.5 MBytes more - though you wouldn't need C++ for the kernel.

This means that gcc is just another dependency that the script will
resolve before even trying to fetch and compile the driver. The
size of the required download is acceptable even for modem users,
and that has to be done only once.

Of course, distributions can make the gcc (suitable for kernel
compilations) a required (base) package.

> .config files,

I think they are available in "kernel-devel" package or something
like that. They easily can be shipped as part of the kernel RPM.
The kernel-devel package is already available in RH, for example.

Of course, the kernel itself can contain a copy of its own .config
file and export it through /proc fs, along with all compiler options,
that would be neat :-) and only requires an optional module.

> in kernel apis,

That's not something new. APIs change all the time, everywhere, not
only in OSes. Programmers just need to use #if ... #endif and maybe
the driver should be marked as "suitable" or "tested" on some range
of kernel releases.

> and security with regards to "automatic downloads"?

Linus already signs his kernel releases. There is no reason why
driver maintainers can't join the web of trust. Then GPG will
cheerfully accept signatures of partially trusted signers. It is
very easy to do, publishers only need to get their public key
signed by many other publishers, and the threshold for the sufficient
trust can be hardcoded to be fairly high.

/***/

It is clear to me that Linux needs a mechanism for fetching and
installing 3rd party drivers. The proposed technology seems to
be quite simple, and requires very little development because
all components are already here. I think, a single script can
definitely accomplish searching, downloading, compiling (kbuild?)
and installing the driver. This project is all about organizing
software and people to do it right.

Thanks,
Dmitri

-- 
panic("esp: penguin status phase.");
(Panic message in the kernel.)

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