Well, we can disagree about the majority of drivers. My feeling is
that most of the drivers that are really used by lots of people get
support beyond just a dump of docs -- in fact often vendors are
maintaining them, eg e1000, tg3, cciss, etc., to pick some running on
the boxes I have around here.
> > Just look at the in-tree drivers: there are tons of them that don't
> > work on big-endian platforms, or have 64-bit problems, or have no SMP
> > support. And that doesn't even count drivers that are so bitrotted
> > they won't even build any more.
> > Like Jeff said, many of these are quite old.
OK, but why isn't your army of volunteers fixing them?
And I seem to recall there's more SATA chipset documentation than Jeff
Garzik has time to implement support for.
I'm disagreeing with a stronger assertion -- your original email said
that if a vendor just dumps out hardware documentation and donates a
few devices, then that vendor will definitely get a driver that will
be picked up by enterprise distros and run on every Linux platform.
And that just isn't true, or at least experience shows it hasn't been
true until now.