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

[Chris Ball <cjb@laptop.org>]

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

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?

Thanks,

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb@laptop.org>   <http://printf.net/>
One Laptop Per Child