Linux Driver Project Status Report as of April 2008

Peter Robinson pbrobinson at gmail.com
Tue Apr 29 20:54:50 UTC 2008


On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 6:39 PM, Greg KH <greg at kroah.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 02:10:06PM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
>  > One of the biggest group of devices that I feel are not overly well
>  > supported (more from a community easily available driver set) are some
>  > of the embedded style devices used for audio and video.
>  >
>  > There seems to be a lot of TV Set Top Box style devices that either
>  > run linux or can run Linux. Sigma Designs released codes around 2003
>  > for the devices then but there doesn't seem to be any since for their
>  > newer devices or for even the 2.6 kernel. There's dozens of devices
>  > that are based around these sort of devices based on Sigma, Broadcom
>  > or some other embedded media processor that would be cool if they were
>  > supported driver and kernel wise better than current. One example is
>  > the Sarotech Abigs DVP570HD
>  > (http://www.sarotech.com/english/product/dvp-570.html), the firmware
>  > runs on some ancient version of Linux, would be cool to be able to run
>  > a decent 2.6.x on it with newer interfaces like elisa.
>
>  Are there drivers for this hardware anywhere for older kernel versions
>  that we should just forward port?
>
>  Or would this be a "from scratch" implementation?

The main chipsets that I've seen with the older releases are some of
the Sigma Designs and Broadcom 73xx series of chips. From what I've
found Sigma Designs released a code dump late 2003 [1] for the EM8500
series. Since then there's been the EM8620L, SMP86x0 series of chips.
Seems that some third parties have done releases for the 8620 [2][3]
but I haven't seen for any of the others.

Of the Broadcom ones the main release that I've seen is for the Tivo
2.5 series [4][5]

Then of course there's all the other random bits that hang of these
devices like net, storage, tv tuners and mpeg encoders :-)

[1] http://www.uclinux.org/pub/uClinux/ports/arm/EM8500/
[2] MVix STB http://www.mvixusa.com/support/index.php?_m=downloads&_a=viewdownload&downloaditemid=19
[3] Kiss DVD http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Content_C1&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1115416836002&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper
[4] http://dynamic.tivo.com/linux/linux.asp
[5] http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=36801



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