Re: Termination of the Philips Webcam Driver (pwc)

Geert Uytterhoeven
2004-08-27T22:45:04Z

On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Anton Altaparmakov wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Anton Altaparmakov wrote:
> > On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > > But Greg is right - we don't keep hooks that are there purely for binary
> > > drivers. If somebody wants a binary driver, it had better be a whole
> > > independent thing - and it won't be distributed with the kernel.
> >
> > So how come we allow drivers which load binary firmware into the kernel?
> > And there are plenty of them...
> >
> > There isn't very much difference between binary firmware and the binary
> > module in this case. Lets see what each of these does:
> >
> > - binary firmware: protects the intellectual rights of the people who
> > designed the chips by not showing anyone how they work by not showing the
> > original program code that drives the chips
> >
> > - binary module at hand: protects the intellectual rights of the people
> > who designed the chips by not showing anyone how they work by not
> > showing the original program code that drives the extended functionality
> > of the chips
> >
> > Sound simillar?
> >
> > IMHO they are identical except that the firmware is downloaded to the
> > hardware and executed by a different cpu while the binary module is
> > executed by the host cpu.
>
> I was a bit fast, there is the issue of different arhitectures for the
> host cpu but if the producers of the binary code care they would produce
> the appropriate binary code for each architecture. I do not know if this
> is done in this case or not but it certainly is doable...

Not just the different architectures: also different CONFIG options (e.g. SMP
vs. UP).

Open Source drivers with binary firmware are `automatically'[*] supported on
whatever Linux kernel you want.

Binary-only drivers are supported on one architecture, for one specific kernel
version, for one combination of config options.

Although Open Source firmware would be very nice, hardware + firmware can more
or less be considered equivalent to ordinary hardware, i.e. the manufacturer
_could_ have done everything in hardware. That's similar to CPUs with hardwired
logic and CPUs with (programmable) microcode. The firmware has the advantage
that you can fix `hardware' bugs without running a new generation of the actual
hardware.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

Geert

[*] Within reasonable constraints.

P.S. Perhaps I sound a bit more permissive than usual, but it's getting late
;-)
--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds