I have been given the mission, "if I choose to accept it" of taking over development of a certain external storage provider's linux kernel module development. The company has implemented a pretty good windows interface, but their Linux and MAC software has faltered.

The software communicates with the storage unit allowing the computers that access the unit as a mounted disk, but the company uses a proprietary protocol for the connection rather than tcp/ip. They are able to move data significantly faster across the LAN in this way.

They also hope to embed linux in things like security cameras, or some other "dumb terminals" which will be using the one of their storage devices as the local disk. None of that has been realized until now. The final module must work across many platforms though and at every user level. A lot of home users are getting by with the limited version but the company hopes to beef it up to the level of the windows version.

The stalled kernel module sources exist, but the company is not willing to release the entire code to open source for whatever reasons. I think it is about 80% GPL at this time.

So I am gathering information and input from those much more experienced than I, to decide if I should undertake the project. I'm posting here to see what is the best distribution to develop this on. I use debian linux. I have managed a CentOS server and tinkered briefly with unix and some of the live CDs. I'd like to develop on Debian but I know rpm package is very popular. Most of the users who request updated versions ask about Ubuntu drivers.

If you have any insight about the most easily transformable kernel module package please tell me what to aim for.

I can't see I see much sense on your question about cross-platform in which regards the kernel land related stuff.

Leaving aside distro specific patches that are often minor things, all the distros are going to use the same kernel. The truly important thing that you need to consider is which kernel version is going to be the base for your development. If you need to test on many platforms probably a source based distro like Gentoo is going to be the best, because you can compile it to run in almost anything. Binary distros often offer precompiled packages for a very finite number of architectures. Though some like debian might offer a wider choice.

As for rpm vs. deb vs. whatever else. I wouldn't worry about that at all. Just ship the sources are a regular tar.gz package. When the thing is ready you can worry about generating whatever binary packages that you need. That's an unrelated problem and often user contributed packages are going to help with that (any debian user can create a .deb for debian, same for rpm on mandriva or whatever).