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



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