drivers

It's very entertaining to hear people talking about Linux device drivers for particular platform. For example, "we have developed drivers for our chip for omap3evm". Or "our driver perfectly works on Mainstone therefore porting it to your PXA platfrom should be realy easy". And the best one "How much time would it take to make the driver we used with PXA270 work on PXA300?".
I admit I was not there in the VxWorks days. More than that, I almost was not there in 2.4 and early 2.6 kernel days. But making such statements now when driver model exists in Linux kernel for several years sounds real nonsense. In Linux either you have a device driver or not. It cannot be a driver that works on platform A and fails on platform B. If an SPI network chip has driver for a single development platform, or even worse, lot of

#ifdef PLATFORM_A
  ... some code ...
#elif defined(PLATFORM_B)
  ... some other code ...
#endif

fragments in the driver, it means that this chip has no Linux device driver.

LPC

I had a really busy time last month. Being ten days off at the end of October made very backlogged at work and it was not that easy to catch up.

So, at the end of October I was at LinuxCon and LinuxPlumbers. The first one was mostly about marketing of desktop Linux and business acievements in the server market. So, most of the talks were in the business spirit and somehow seemed bored to me, modest developer. Except, perhaps, the Kernel Roundtable, that was really entertaining.

The Plumbers conference, on the contrary, aimed the developers and most presentations and sessions were "development driven". Although most of the speakers were less proficient in presentations than Mark Shuttleworth or Jim Zemlin, it was much more interesting for me to attend Plumbers talks than LinuxCon ones.

Some concluding notes from the conferences:
- ARM chip vendors are pushing towards ARM net-top/net-book. Ubuntu Karmic Koala supports Freescale iMX.51 and Marvell Dove, and according to Canonical insiders Freescale and Marvel are behind it :)
- Intel tries hard to increse Atom MID devices market share and even enter cell phone market with x86 architecture. And, according to H. Peter Anvin, "New Intel low-power chip is not a PC".
- V4L will undergo large rework to target capture controllers found in modern SoCs
- People say that the best connection point between Europe and US is Frankfurt