[Ksummit-2013-discuss] [ATTEND] initrd, staging tree, and multi-tree management

Takashi Iwai tiwai at suse.de
Fri Jul 12 15:09:30 UTC 2013


At Fri, 12 Jul 2013 07:54:00 -0700,
Greg KH wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 01:04:49PM +0200, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'd like to attend this year's kernel summit.
> > 
> > * A topic that came to my mind is about initrd.  Although initrd is a
> > pretty fundamental thing for kernel, we don't touch this development
> > directly at all.  As a result, there are way different
> > implementations.  For distro POV, a unified "official" tool would make
> > a lot of sense. 
> > 
> > I remember Dave Jones once proposed it years back, and I'll try to
> > whip a dead horse, as the situation hasn't changed at all since then.
> 
> Isn't dracut the answer here?  I thought just about all distros, except
> SuSE, were now using it?

Maybe.  I need more researches.
It's mostly a distro issue, but still I'd like to hear what kernel
people think of it.

> > * Another topic is about staging tree.  The staging tree is surely a
> > good move, but the development of drivers in staging tree looks far
> > from ideal, unfortunately.  It seems to me that it's not clear whether
> > many staging drivers are intended to be merged to the main subsystem
> > or just been there. 
> > And, in many cases, the drivers submitted to the staging tree got
> > rotten while the vendor continues the development of out-of-tree
> > driver.
> 
> I was not aware of drivers that were in staging while the vendor
> developed an out-of-tree version, do you have any specific examples?
> I'll gladly just drop the in-tree version because of this.

Well, I don't want to advocate for dropping just because of this.
The out-of-tree development isn't done always by vendor but often by
volunteers, too.

IIRC, crystalhd had a few newer versions, but the latest release isn't
clear.  Realtek is keeping up their own drivers, but I cannot follow
all rtl* and rts* (there way too many forks)...

> And yes, some drivers have gotten "stale" in staging, a bunch are now
> marked to be deleted so 3.11 and 3.12 should look a lot better in that
> area thanks to the help of the summer intern we now have working on the
> staging tree.

That's good to know!


thanks,

Takashi


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