Linux Driver Project Initiative

Executive Summary

Linux has done it again. It is an established fact that Linux is the market leader in the server market with a significant market share. It is poised to be the next big challenge to the current market leader in the desktop world. Writing is on the wall with the latest release of Ubuntu and Fedora distributions, it is fast catching up in the desktop world. It is already the platform of choice for educational institutions and government organizations throughout the world. Linux is slowly penetrating home servers, enterprise servers and embedded real time systems. There are more companies paying attention to the fact that Linux is being used everywhere from missions critical servers to tiny embedded (example: iPhone) systems.

Linux Drivers Today

Linux's support for legacy peripherals and devices is legendary. It can bring back life to that old PC gathering dust in your garage for ages. It also supports thousands of latest and greatest devices, protocols, architectures and peripherals as well. Linux is the one operating system that people rely on to support anything that is thrown at it. Linux has thousands of device drivers that are thoroughly tested and supported by active kernel developers and various third parties. However, there still remain challenges that need to be tackled. While most of the devices and peripherals work out of the box, some of them require tweaking by experienced Linux engineers.

Linux Driver Project

Enter the "Linux Driver Project Initiative (LDPI)" (http://www.linuxdriverproject.org), initiated by Greg Kroh-Hartman. Greg co-authored the canonical Linux kernel development references and is the current Linux kernel maintainer of the Linux USB, PCI, I2C? , and sysfs subsystems inter alia. Greg stands at the head of a robust team of project managers, hundreds of device driver engineers, and thousands of kernel developers. With this elaborate team LDPI is paddling towards making all the devices/peripherals known to mankind to work under Linux.

What we offer

Free Linux driver development resources. Yes that is "Free" as in Freedom.

LDPI's mission is to work with companies that manufacture devices/peripherals and make sure their devices are fully supported in Linux. We want to change the device tags that are today displayed as “not-supported”, “partially-supported” or “supported-but-requires-tweaking” to “fully-supported” under Linux. With the army of highly experienced Linux engineers LDPI attempts to provide the needed support to develop and maintain the Linux drivers. This will ease up the resource/budget constraints on companies and help them spend their effort and money to promote/sell their devices in the growing Linux market space.

How it works?

1. As a hardware/systems company, a desire to make your product work under Linux is the first step. In fact it is the 90% of the work you will have to do to make this happen.

2. Either LDPI establishes contact with the company to voluntarily write the driver for the company’s product, or the company requests for a driver to be written by LDPI. (LDPI welcomes active contacts from companies to develop drivers)

3. LDPI assigns a Project Manager (PM) from its pool to work with the company.

4. PM gathers a team of highly experienced engineers from the LDPI pool with the domain knowledge for the particular device/peripheral.

5. Company designates a contact person to provide background information such as device specifications and documentation for the internal workings.

6. LDPI can sign reasonable NDA where there is a necessity (???Two model of LDPI NDA – open source or closed source???).

7. Project manager takes charge of driver development.

8. PM works with the company to negotiate the project schedule based on the availability of resources, complexity of the project and market requirements.

9. PM updates the company and LDPI community about the status of development, testing and any other issues. PM will actively work with kernel community to include the driver or support for the driver in the mainline Linux kernel.

10. On some specific cases test devices might be required for successful testing by the LDPI. PM will request the company for the test devices. These will be returned upon completion of testing.

Yes. It is that simple. Company works on items 1 and 5 only, on some special cases 6 or 10. Really that is all needed to get high performance Linux drivers, no strings attached.

Any Gotchas!?

No. Absolutely none. The team at LDPI has the history of producing high quality open source products. The team is backed up by some of the prestigious people in the industry. Company’s IP, specifications, code and other confidential information are all safe with the LDPI team.

Benefits

* Company gets a team of highly capable engineers with multiple years of writing peer reviewed Linux device drivers at no cost.

* Company gets a team of experienced device driver QA engineers. This eliminates the need for the company to have a QA team.

* Access to the large and growing Linux market with no or minimal cost to the company.

* Company never has to worry about maintaining the drivers again. Once a driver is merged to the mainline kernel, the global kernel development community assumes responsibility for keeping it working.

* If specifications change, company may make these available through the LDPI and let us manage the driver modifications and maintenance.

* Depending on the number and nature of the devices, the cost savings in driver development and maintenance will be substantial.

* A prestigious link in your website for Linux driver binaries that your Linux customers can download and use.

* Visibility in the market as a company that supports multiple platforms.

Conclusion

The Linux project is widely regarded as the largest collaborative project in human history. The LDPI takes it a little further by working with companies like yours to help extend the market penetration of the platform. We are determined to make our mission a grand success. By helping you we strive to make Linux a force to reckon with in servers, desktops and embedded systems. We look forward to work with you for a bright Linux future.

• Linux_Driver_Project_Initiative.pdf: Linux_Driver_Project_Initiative.pdf

• Linux_Driver_Project_Initiative.pdf: Linux_Driver_Project_Initiative.pdf