About Driver Backport Workgroup
The Driver Backport workgroup creates distribution-independent means to create, distribute, maintain and support backports of current upstream drivers on the older kernels of Linux distributions.
The goal is to make Linux distributions run easily on anything that can run Linux at the day it comes to market.
Why?
Most Linux users use a distribution, not Linux from scratch. If the distro is older than the hardware, they hope to find a simple-to-use update medium with "new drivers to get it working". They also expect the system to continue to run after any system update, and obviously also after system upgrades (to the next distribution release).
So to keep distribution users happy, the distributors together with the system and component vendors test each and every kernel and driver update.
In the past, when the kernel and the drivers were distributed together, that meant three alternatives for systems that need drivers newer than what is on the distribution:
- pay the distributor to retest all older systems relying on the driver you need and get a driver update in the distro kernel
- wait for the next distro release (service pack, new release)
- build your own driver, somehow, unsupported by the distro. And fingers crossed it still works after kernel updates or distro upgrades...
In essence the one main hindrance of getting Linux widely supported with distributions was the retesting effort of the "one kernel for all" distribution model.
Conference Calls
TBD
Workgroup Resources
- Workgroup Charter
- Mailing List
- freenode:#driverbackports
- Running Agenda
Subtopics
- driver backport source management
- driver packaging and build
- driver distribution, installation and status check
Calendar
Links to work-in-progress
Driver Backport
About Driver Backport Workgroup
The Driver Backport workgroup creates distribution-independent means to create, distribute, maintain and support backports of current upstream drivers on the older kernels of Linux distributions.
The goal is to make Linux distributions run easily on anything that can run Linux at the day it comes to market.
kmp_packaging_and_build
Once a driver has been backported it needs to be precompiled to the distro kernel for distribution.
This should work as similar as possible accross the different distributions so system and component vendors can focus their energies from adding Linux support to more distros to adding Linux support to more hardware.
kmp_distribution_installation_and_status_check
Once backported drivers have been built into packages, these packages need to be distributed to the "sysadmin" so installation works as easy as possible for him.
While the Linux user doesn't care too much about different installation methods accross distributions and there is some happy coopetition in this, the hardware vendor techsupport would strongly prefer to have distro agnostic diagnostic tools to check the driver status.
source_management
There is many ways how to manage the growing delta between the some current kernel API and the API of an older, distro specific kernel.
This page collects the specific issues, how different people deal with them and from there we come up with some best practices how to do it with least effort.
As we anticiapte distro differences in the kernel even once we have these best practices, this page also lists the distro specifics of the kernels.
So in one sentence the scope of this effort is
sample_kmp_source
DRAFT: This page is under construction
This is the source code for the "Hello World" sample module referenced by Sample KMP spec file.
KMP Macros
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