[linux-audio-dev] Getting out of the software game

[Lee Revell]

On 3/14/07, Maarten de Boer <mdeboer at iua.upf.edu> wrote:
> > I think you misread my technical statement as a political one.  I
> > don't care about politics or the GPL, I just want Linux to be the most
> > stable OS, and that can't happen if secret blobs of code are allowed
> > to scribble all over kernel memory.
>
> I have an additional argument against binary drivers. Some years ago,
> we had a server with a Highpoint IDE RAID controller. We bought it
> because the Highpoint actually had an "open source driver" tgz for it
> on it on its webpage. It turned out though that this "open source
> driver" was a binary blob with some "open source" kernel glue code
> around it (just like the nvidia and ati drivers). Anyway, too late to
> go back, we used the controller with the binary driver, kernel 2.4.
> After a while had to to upgrade to a 2.6 kernel, but Highpoint only
> provided a 2.4 driver. This caused a lot of trouble.

Heh, I forgot about that one - vendors who keep their source closed so
they can lie about the capabilities of the hardware.  I suspect they
marketed a fakeraid (aka software RAID implemented at driver level)
device as hardware RAID.  This is common in sound drivers too -
devices are advertised as supporting "hardware AC3/DTS/whatever
encoding" while in fact the driver does it in software.

Lee