[advocacy-discuss] Community Innovation Awards

[Alan DuBoff]

On Wed, 12 Dec 2007, Ken Mays wrote:

> Alan Coopersmith said: "These are of course absolutely critical areas to 
> the success of OpenSolaris, but they generally aren't sources of 
> "Innovation". I could see some work there being innovative - creating a 
> new driver framework like Nemo, the IPS work, or defining a new way to 
> get documentation to users - but just writing a driver for a given 
> device, porting/packaging an existing application, or writing 
> documentation aren't breaking new ground."
>
> I don't agree with this 100% as that 'new' device drivers are critical 
> when it allows an OEM to get a motherboard or hardware working properly 
> (i.e. hibernation mode, ATI FireGL support, etc). Writing documentation 
> is also one of those seemingly 'thankless' jobs that built the 'Sun 
> BluePrint' collection and docs.sun.com. Someone can create IPS 
> framework, but lack of good docs to support it will only get it so far 
> with end-users. Same with Xorg/XSun.

I don't think AlanC said that new drivers aren't critical, they certainly 
are, and most all of us agree.

I tend to agree with AlanC though, they really aren't innovative. This 
doesn't mean they're not critical, they are.

FWIW, so far there have been 2 drivers putback into OpenSolaris from the 
community, the afe and mxfe which Garrett D'Amore wrote. I am currently 
working on getting Masa Murayama's sfe driver putback.

Of all the device drivers in OpenSolaris, Garrett's drivers are 2 of the 
cleanest driver code that resides in ON. Murayama's driver is now cstyle 
and lint clean, entirely as well. I can say with confidence that the 
quality of the code for these drivers is up at the top of the list, as far 
as cleanliness goes.

That is not innovative IMO, but none the less, all of us should be 
thankful that our community can generate excellent code, as good or better 
than some of the code that currently resides in ON.

Even more so, my hat is off to both Garrett and Masa, this is what open 
source is all about, and frankly, these gentlemen have followed in the Sun 
tradition of producing quality code.

I could go on and rant about the test suites, and/or getting a driver to 
pass them, but I won't...because that's not innovative either...;-)

--

Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group