[Ksummit-2009-discuss] Meeting userspace requirements

Matthew Wilcox matthew at wil.cx
Sat Jul 11 18:04:42 PDT 2009


On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 06:54:18PM -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
> OK, so looking at the above I think there are three classes of people
> requesting features
> 
>      1. Like the above ... sophisticated consumer, capable of writing
>         their own code, just didn't realise that they could code a
>         feature and submit it (mainly because no other OS does this,
>         even if you get access to the source code under NDA)
>      2. Users who can interest general developers in their feature ...
>         usually either because it's a neat, cool extension of something
>         the developer has done before or because it takes the
>         developer's code into situations the developer can't test
>         themselves.
>      3. Users who have esoteric feature requests that no general
>         developer would be interested in. (Like I've got this XYZ data
>         capture card and I won't use Linux unless you write a driver for
>         it).
> 
> I think cases one and two can be handled by documentation and outreach.
> It's case three I'm a bit troubled by.  When the same request comes into
> a proprietary OS, they either say "sure, that will be $x thousands of
> dollars, please" or "well, you're the first person to ask, prove to us
> (by finding others who need this) that there's a business case for this
> feature".  We don't really have any equivalent mechanisms (well, other
> than "why don't you find a group of people who need this and fund a
> developer to work on it?").

I thought Greg had the driver-writing aspect of things all sewn up?
http://www.linuxdriverproject.org/twiki/bin/view

I don't think we have _users_ requesting _kernel_ features.  We have
developers requesting features, but they aren't kernel developers; they
have their own set of interests and learning how to be a kernel hacker
isn't one of them.  Fair enough.

What we lack is a way for these people to communicate with kernel
developers that can help them -- whether or not that's our fault isn't
a terribly interesting question; the important point is that they seem
to feel that way.

At the end of the day though, they're going to need to persuade
someone that not only is this feature a good idea, but that it's a good
enough idea for them to spend their valuable spare time working on.
That's probably where things will fall down.

-- 
Matthew Wilcox				Intel Open Source Technology Centre
"Bill, look, we understand that you're interested in selling us this
operating system, but compare it to ours.  We can't possibly take such
a retrograde step."


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