On Monday 20 December 2010 19:07:30 Jerome Glisse wrote:
I also do not think that it is at all kernel policy to disallow kernel drivers which do not have opensource userspace components. In fact, Linus Torvalds begs to differ on this matter. The fact of the matter is that the driver lives now, Qualcomm have it in their upstream, Freescale have it in their upstream, Linaro are going to fetch from that. It doesn't need to go all the way to stable, because people can compile their own kernels if they want (and Linaro is there provide the source to do that with the best interoperability with the silicon vendors' chips as possible).
I was just expressing my opinion on upstream, if i see this driver showing up on lkml i will reply with a nak and explain why (pretty much same argument as here). I don't have any authority on linux kernel but as far as i understand it, it's about reviewing what's gets in, so i hope my review opinion would matter (what ever the out come is).
There is a broad agreement on disallowing new kernel to userspace interfaces in the upstream kernel unless there is an application using it that is both open source and considered useful.
I don't think Linaro as a group takes a position or should take a position on closed source user space at all -- we just don't need to bother with it because we have enough work to do on free components. However, we have a policy on kernel code and that is as I mentioned before that we don't take code unless it's about to go upstream. In this case, upstream doesn't take the driver, so Linaro won't either.
Arnd