[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] hobbyist recruiting

[Andrew Lunn]

> Agree. That is why I point people to OpenWRT which has tons of hardware
> support which is not mainline. And old routers can quite easily be
> obtained. Yet, one must be willing enough to get support of a mostly
> outdated HW into the kernel, just for the fun of it.

I've had some success contacting the authors of kirkwood SoC based
board ports that are in OpenWRT and asking them to contribute there
patches to mainline. It has not been too much effort helping them
clean up the contribution to get the code in mainline. Nobody has made
the transition to a regular contributer, but they do tend to help with
testing when patches affect there board and you ask for tests.

arch/arm/boot/dts$ ls -1 *.dts | cut -f 1 -d - | sort | uniq -c| sort -rn

     57 kirkwood
     33 omap3
     19 imx6q
     18 imx28
     14 armada
     12 imx6dl
     10 tegra20
      9 ste
      9 imx53
      7 sun4i
      7 omap4
      6 am335x
      5 imx27
  
With the usual declaimer of lies, damn lies, and statistics, it looks
like we are doing something right. And kirkwood is mostly hobbyist
maintained.

     Andrew