25 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
25 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
How chip makers should (not) support Free Software
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Silicon manufacturers, or rather design houses play a key aspect in how well
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their products are supported in Free Software oparating systems such as Linux.
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In the early Linux days - more than a decade ago - it was normal to have
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completely public technical reference manuals for the silicon, enabling Linux
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community developers to write drivers for the chips.
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After chip design houses start to realize there is an economically significant
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Linux market, they try to use their existing workflow, processes and
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development model for proprietary operating systems and try to apply this to
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Linux. The result are in many cases binary-only drivers for certain Kernel
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versions and/or distributions or unmaintained, non-portable, coding style
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incompliant open source drivers for outdated kernel versions. Those kind of
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drivers are bound to create dissatisfaction within the Free Software developer
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community, among the Free Software users. Furthermore, they also result in
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inefficient use of R&D resources both inside and outside the chip vendor.
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Many silicon design houses still don't understand the Free Software and
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particularly Linux development model at all. This results in suboptimal
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support of their hardware products. In the end, customers are likely to buy
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from a different vendor.
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So what can chip design houses do to ensure excellent support of their products
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in the Free Software world?
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