General Red Hat Question

Bigun · 09-11-2002, 09:02 AM

With each new distribution of Linux does the HCL grow? If so, who are the ones writting the drivers?

MasterC · 09-11-2002, 10:41 AM

Everyone! It's openSource, meaning anyone can write a driver for it. Newer kernels support more hardware, yes. But that doesn't mean that driver writing is limited to Alan Cox.

To learn more about the kernel, check out the kernel FAQ:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/

Here's the section on drivers:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/#s2-4

Cool

Faecal · 09-11-2002, 11:09 AM

Some manufacturers write their own linux drivers, for example nvidia. Some manufacturers sponsor external driver development projects, such as Conexant, who supply some closed-source code necessary to make drivers for HCF and HSF winmodems.

I'd say that the majority of drivers are still written independently by unpaid third parties, and we should all be mightily thankful to them.

A lot of driver development is centralised in larger projects - for example OSS, and XFree86.