They’re still waiting to be mainstreamed into the kernel. The process of integrating drivers into the kernel is complicated. Coding practices of the coder that wrote the driver play a large part in that. Buggy or badly written code will not get accepted. Not all of these drivers have the code quality that is required in order to be merged with the kernel.
Had some problems while trying to compile and install a WiFi driver for the first time. Managed to find the email of the driver’s creator and sent them a message. They responded a few hours later with incredibly helpful guidance, walking me through the process and enabling me to get it working, all while gaining valuable insights…
Way back in the olde tymes, I was having trouble with the NIC driver in my Linux install. I posted a question about it on USENET, and got a reply from the guy who wrote the drivers. He asked for some info about the card, then updated the driver to support it.
There used to be a lot of cards based on same or similar chips, but with small differences. That made little changes to drivers common. It’s a bit like LCD modules or audio chipset quirks. One driver with tons of little differences depending on what each manufacturer decided to do differently.
Yeah, I know, that’s why the kernel with the drivers is not more than 150MB. Otherwise, you’d have the Windows situation where driverpacks compressed with 7z (LZMA2, solid archive, 273 word dictionary size and 2GB decompression memory, which requires about 128GB of RAM to compress) take about 30GB.
You have to pack the driver from each manufacturer because of signatures, even though they might even be the same with other drivers in the pack… but, REV differs and oh well, the driver installer doesn’t recognize that driver as a valid one for that device.
Of course, the kernel drivers are now commonly signed. The real problem is catering to manufacturers demanding to have their own bespoke driver pack, often including some stupid branded management application, when it’s just the same as the other dozen manufacturers packaging of the same product. Then you end up with bloated “driver packs” and a system tray of a half dozen vendors screaming for you to pay attention to them and know that they are somehow contributing to your experience.
In Linux, you have a kernel driver and a myriad of vendor’s pci ids mixed together and the vendors just have to deal with it. As a side effect, a USB to serial dongle is about 99% likely to work in Linux, and in my experience 90% unlikely to work in Windows (can’t find the driver for it, or in one very prominent case Microsoft bans drivers of counterfeit chips that function fine, but violate IP rights). Punishing the counterfeiters may have been understandable, but ultimately the unwitting customers paid rather than the counterfeiters (they still sold their devices, but the users that were oblivious suffered).
The real problem is catering to manufacturers demanding to have their own bespoke driver pack, often including some stupid branded management application, when it’s just the same as the other dozen manufacturers packaging of the same product. Then you end up with bloated “driver packs” and a system tray of a half dozen vendors screaming for you to pay attention to them and know that they are somehow contributing to your experience.
This is exactly why I use driverpacks in Windows (3rd party, like SDI). If the drivers are not in the pack, I download them from the manufacturer and if they’re packed with an app, I just extract the whole thing and point Windows (through manual driver update) to search for the drivers in that location. It will install only what it needs to work, nothing else.
they still sold their devices, but the users that were oblivious suffered
Or they did know, but the copy was a lot cheaper than the real thing. Hell, I’ve done it. If it does the same thing, why buy the more expensive thingie. I get IP rights and all that, but seriously, in the end, you just have to deal with these things. Unless you’re Intel, you should expect your device/chip to end up being copied. China doesn’t enforce western world IP laws, so it’s a “free for all” kind of a thing there. If you plan on doing this (making your own device/chip), your device/chip better be niche enough so it’s not viable to actually copy the design. Otherwise, copies will pop up left and right.
Back in the day I was running GLTron on an Athlon 1800+ w/Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 (I think?) and I was running dual monitors. GLTron didn’t like using both screens since it presented as a peculiar resolution. So I emailed the GLTron dude and he quickly emailed me a patch that let me run the game across both monitors (bezels not an issue because I was doing multiplayer split screen).
A lot of Linux drivers are like this - just one or two people maintaining them. They usually eventually mainline the driver rather than having a separate Git repo though.
It’s mind boggling just thinking that things like this depend on the effort of one or two guys… while on the other hand, it’s not so uncommon that a team of engineers and developers fails to deliver a working (mostly) bugfree product.
I think management is who is responsible for the shitty decisions, as always… and, in general, just holding the team back.
The thing with drivers is that the hardware they’re written for doesn’t really change. A particular network card is always going to behave the same way. Once the driver works well, it’s pretty much complete, and the only changes that are needed are bug fixes, updates to handle new firmware, or adjustments if the kernel changes some implementation detail of how drivers are used. There could be months or years between updates to the driver.
Some manufacturers have great first-party Linux support. Intel is a good example - they contribute a lot of code to the kernel, and their drivers are maintained by employees.
There could be months or years between updates to the driver.
Yes, but someone still has to implement that “a thing or two” in it every few years.
Some manufacturers have great first-party Linux support. Intel is a good example - they contribute a lot of code to the kernel, and their drivers are maintained by employees.
Agreed. But, to be honest, most aren’t. Just take a look at Realtek. There’s bound to be at least one chip made by them on your board (in most cases, two, LAN and audio, two very crucial pieces of hardware).
Realtek NICs are junk (even the buggy Intel I225-v chip is better) so I try to avoid them, but I honestly haven’t ever checked which sound chip my motherboard uses. I’ll have to check if it’s a Realtek one. Realtek is generally the lower-end manufacturer for cheaper products.
Realtek is basically on every retail motherboard manufacturer. Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, Biostar, ASRock, etc. If you’re talking about hi-end or server grade motherboards, yeah, but let’s face it, the chips are cheap so they’re practically in every household.
I’ve got a “ASUS ROG Strix B550-F” which wasn’t exactly a high-end motherboard when I got it (I got it because it was cheap), but it’s got an Intel chip rather than a Realtek one. The lower-end motherboards have Realtek NICs but I usually don’t get the cheapest of anything since there’s usually a pretty big difference in quality if you spend just a little bit more.
The Intel I226-V chip on that motherboard is only $2.87 each (for quantities of 1000, even cheaper for large bulk orders) and the manufacturer can likely use the same PHY chip and timing components, so it doesn’t really increase the price a lot to use a non-Realtek chip.
ROG is a Republic Of Gamers edition motherboard… it’s probably a lot more expensive than the lower end models (like my Z97-K board for example… and that wasn’t cheap as well, like 100€ back in the day).
I guess the definition of “cheap” varies from person to person. My definition of cheap is lower end (50, 60€ tops) motherboards. I don’t buy those either, but make no mistake, they’re a common household item in 3rd world countries (I can vouch for that).
I have no idea what the prices are for a Realtek NIC vs. other manufacturers. All I know is, they’re usually the default choice for cheaper models… which probably means they’re dirt cheap. Have no idea how this compares to Intel or other manufacturers (Marvel, Qualcomm, etc.).
In general, yes, those NICs are cheap. But, let’s take USB to Ethernet adapters. I don’t think Intel has a solution for those things… or if they do, it’s probably more expensive than the one Realtek offers. It’s $5 on AliExpress. They’re not great, but they get the job done (no wifi, no onboard etherent plug on a brand new laptop, and you need internet to get it up to date with drivers). I haven’t looked for anything else since this one does a great job, but I guess that, even if there is an Intel based solution out there, it’ll be at least tripple the price of the Realtek one.
Unfortunately, it would likely be detrimental to my ongoing work situation.
Though saying that, the BBC had a guy who would turn up to work dressed as a wizard (think harry potter style). He was the reason Teletext continued for so long. He was the last one left on the team. They retired Teletext the day after he retired himself.
I’m still not sure I have the force of personality to not just look like an idiot try hard however. 🤷♂️
Tempting… Unfortunately, I don’t think I could pull it off. You need a certain… force of personality to pull off something like that. I’m just not outgoing (or skilled!) enough to pull off a full Thom Merrilin look.
I remember early 2020, there was a small push to bring capes back, before something else took over every discussion. Something about blue jays or crows or something
Send your thanks directly to the maintainer (preferably email/mastadon/twitter/etc, not a ticket)! Open source maintainers don’t get a lot of positive direct feedback.
To be honest, yes. In general, not just tech or Linux related stuff. You look at humanity and what it has come down to, and then you notice these people… and hope fills your heart again.
The vast majority of my open source projects, I’m the only user. I release it open source because back in the day, GitHub only allowed open source projects if you want to use it.
But another reason is the hope that someone will find it helpful. If not the project itself but maybe the code.
I have one project that has a significant following and honestly it’s sometimes very scary because I might not want to keep it updated because of my own interests changing.
That’s the great thing about open source though. Sure, you might drop off the face of the earth tomorrow. But if you do, the code is there, and maybe someone who was using it clones the repo and carries on that work.
The astounding thing is history is full of these types of people when you peel back the “couple great men” narrative of history and actually look at how good things happened, it is kind of bewildering.
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