Re: [How to upload our driver to "kernel.org"] Would you give me your advice?

[Masa <masa.korg@gmail.com>]

Thank you for explaining the overview.
I will choose an appropriate model and confirm information of the URLs later.

> There are resources available to help you with getting your patches
> based on the latest kernel version.  There are many ways in which a
> company can be involved with supporting their hardware with a fully
> supported Linux device driver.
>
> One model is one where the hardware company employs an engineer who is
> actively involved with Linux community and is constantly upgrading and
> developing their device driver against the latest kernel, and then
> group such as the Driver Backport Workgroup[1] will backport drivers
> to various enterprise kernels.  Some companies like this model because
> they retain control over the development of the device driver, and
> they can also update it to support hardware not yet released for sale;
> some companies such as Intel and IBM, have been able to use this model
> to assure that the latest mainstream kernel has support for a new
> version of their hardware device at or before the moment it is
> released for sale to the general public.
>
> Another model is one where the company makes some combination of (1)
> hardware specifications, (2) patches against an older kernel, and (3)
> hardware available to developers (the Linux Foundation can help
> faciliate this), and then a group such as the Linux Driver Project[2]
> can help write a driver or port the driver to the latest kernel.  This
> is done on a volunteer basis, and so how quickly this might happen is
> less under the control of the hardware company involved.
>
> There are many other models in between these two extremes, depending
> on how closely the company is willing and interested to work with the
> Linux development community.  For example, the upstream maintainer may
> be a volunteer, who gets free hardware samples (and possibly
> occasional contract work) to support the hardware, but the company is
> less involved than the "full engagement" model where their engineer is
> the primary mainstream developer, and but more involved than the
> company dumps some specs, sample code, and some hardware and is
> otherwise not involved.
>
> A general overview of some of the issues involved in why things work
> they way they do can be found here [3].
>
> Best regards,
>
> Theodore Y. Ts'o
> Chief Technical Officer, Linux Foundation
> STSM, IBM Linux Technology Center
> Medford, Massachusetts
> (617) 245-5616, T/L 930-1182
> (781) 391-2699 (fax)
> (781) 526-0121 (cell)
>
> [1] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/driver-backport
> [2] http://www.linuxdriverproject.org/foswiki/bin/view
> [3] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/publications/linux-driver-model

Thank you for your polite reply again.