Proposal for cooperation

Greg KH greg at kroah.com
Mon Jan 28 19:39:44 UTC 2008


On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 12:06:31PM +0100, Sylvain Nahas wrote:
> Dear Linux Driver Project project managers,
> 
> ADDI-DATA GmbH develops (among other) high-precision, high-availability
> PCI boards for industrial use (measurement and process- control ) We
> offers since some years now ???out-of-tree??? Linux drivers for our PCI
> boards. 
> 
> We are wishing to progressively push support for our hardware in the
> mainline kernel. The objective is that for our customers the ADDI-DATA
> Linux experience be ???it just works out of the box???. To achieve this
> goal, we need the help of kernel hackers.

Great!

> Now a point about the current state of affair: 
> 
> * We currently have Linux support for 50 boards, which makes 18 drivers,
> at various levels of maturity and completeness of functionalities.
> Offered functionalities are mainly digital and analogue I/O
> 
> * The code is not Linux coding-style compliant.

That is easy to fix.

> * All of these drivers are GPL-ed.

Great.

> * Most of the communication with user-space is done through ioctl()
> calls. There are no generic kernel subsystems that we are aware of that
> addresses the problematic of our kind of hardware.  Probably developing
> such subsystems would help other vendors as well and improve the kernel.

Hm, that might be more of a problem, but in the end, probably not
really, lots of "custom" interfaces are in a number of different
drivers in the kernel tree today just fine.

> * User API backward compatibility at source-code level is wished but may
> be dropped if there are good reasons for it (for example: integration in
> a generic framework instead of current custom tailored solutions)

Do you have any documentation on what your current interface is, and how
you use it?  Or a pointer to your current drivers would also probably
suffice.

> * We expect this experience to also be the occasion for us to increase
> our skill level and offer (yet) better Linux support in the future.
> 
> I was thinking to begin with simple drivers.
> 
> I will be for now the main correspondent for this project, along with my
> colleague Julien Krauth.
> Please feel free to contact me. 

Great, welcome to the project.

So, what do you want to do to start with?  Do you want to take a single
driver of yours, get it cleaned up and into the tree?  Would that be a
good first step?

thanks,

greg k-h



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