Out of tree drivers [was Re: Larger projects]
Tomasz Chmielewski
mangoo at wpkg.org
Sat Oct 20 08:47:34 UTC 2007
Jason schrieb:
(...)
>>> This would be my first work for lk, though. I'm relatively new to
>>> kernelspace. Recently, I patched Intel's [3] GPL and BSD code for the
>>> ixp400_eth driver to work against vanilla 2.6.18.8 running on an ixp425
>>> (baby steps to current :-) ).
>>>
>>> Speaking of ixp400_eth, would it be possible to merge that one as well?
>>> They have a very clean licensing line. The patch to the kernel tree is
>>> GPL (for ixp400_eth.ko), the code outside the tree (for ixp400.ko) is
>>> BSD, and the firmware is IPL [4]. How big of an issue is the
>>> firmware/IPL?
>> An even better ixp400 patch was posted by Krzysztof Halasa on lkml in
>> May 2007. There was some vivid discussion, but I didn't see any follow
>> ups since then.
>
> Do you have a link?
Oh, just search lkml around for "ixp400" and "Krzysztof Halasa", I'm
sure you'll find it. Best you could do is: 1) contact Krzysztof Halasa,
and ...
>> Speaking of which opens yet another Pandora's box - projects like
>> OpenWRT or NSLU2-Linux (which already use Krzysztof's ixp400 patches)
>> always patch the kernels quite a bit in order to support all these ARM
>> and MIPS devices... Slowly, some of these patches get merged into
>> mainline, though, but sometimes, it looks like they might need some help.
>
> The patch I've currently put together allows ixp400 code to compile
> against *vanilla* 2.6.18.8. I'm in the process of testing in now. Once
> I make sure it runs, I'll start moving the patch toward targeting the
> mainline kernel.
>
> I initially tried to make it compile against 2.6.23, but there were too
> many changes to do it right. So, I figured I'd start with 2.6.18.8
> (only because it was the closest gentoo stable vanilla kernel to the
> version Intel/Timesys suggested using), then move up making small
> changes along the way.
2) contact NSLU2-Linux people and ask them about remaining issues in
this driver.
Originally, Krzysztof's ixp400 driver supported only big endian
machines; I see NSLU2 patches have support for little endian, too (and
work with 2.6.23).
http://trac.nslu2-linux.org/kernel/browser/trunk/patches/2.6.23
--
Tomasz Chmielewski
http://blog.wpkg.org
More information about the devel
mailing list