Free Software Linux

If you have used Linux and ever owned a device that has no driver written for Linux, and the manufacturers don’t supply a driver for Linux, you’d know what kind of pain it is to just own the device and see it not work, or just having to reboot to Windows just to use it.

Creative has officially released the Sound Blaster X-Fi Linux driver under the General Public License. Creative released a disappointing binary driver for the product in 2007, which was only compatible with 64-bit systems and had numerous other major technical problems.

Prefacing a series of 196 patches, Greg KH noted, "due to the low level nature of these patches, and because they touch so many different parts of the kernel, a number of the subsystem maintainers have asked me to get them in first to make merging other trees easier." Linus Torvalds agreed and quickly merged the patches into his tree. Greg summarized the many changes:

"They can be broken down into these major areas: Documentation updates (language translations and fixes, as well as kobject and kset documentation updates.); major kset/kobject/ktype rework and fixes; struct bus_type has been reworked to now handle the lifetime rules properly, as the kobject is properly dynamic; struct driver has also been reworked, and now the lifetime issues are resolved; the block subsystem has been converted to use struct device now, and not 'raw' kobjects; nozomi driver is added; lots of class_device conversions to use struct device instead."

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"This argument seems to start from the assumption that any externally maintained kernel code *can* get into the kernel, which doesn't stand up to reality. Once you admit that there is code which, for very good reasons, won't ever be accepted into the mainline kernel tree, what you are saying amounts to: 'Code that isn't fit to be included in the mainline kernel isn't fit to exist at all'," Tilman Schmidt argued during the ongoing debate about whether or not LSM should support modules.

"I'm trying to keep some external drivers up to date with the kernel, and the first two weeks after the release is the worst time for me. There is no way to distinguish the current git kernel from the latest release. It's only after rc1 is released that I can use the preprocessor to check LINUX_VERSION_CODE," explained Pavel Roskin, describing the ongoing effort to keep the out of tree MadWifi driver in sync with the latest released kernel. Rik Van Riel suggested: