[forum] "Drivers? We don't need no stinking..."

[Egbert Eich]

Alan Cox writes:
 > > The thing I find amusing is that Mike Harris and Red Hat are amongst the
 > > loudest complaining that old devices aren't supported, yet he claims they
 > > have no business case to support the work. So I find it rediculous for him
 > > to flame at volunteers for not doing work he can't make a business case to
 > > pay for...
 > 
 > You must be reading a different mailing list to the rest of us Dave.
 > 

This discussion has taken the wrong turn. 

On this thread we heard a lot about who should do the port and who 
should pay for it and why or why not.
This is not the OpenSource spirit. The best motivation for getting
something done has always been ones personal pain. If someone really 
wanted something to be done he did it himself.
We heard a lot about volunteers on this thread but so far noone has
really stepped up and said "I'm going to port the XXX driver". Yes, I
get the impression people would like to volunteer - but they would
like even more somebody else to do the work.
Appearantly the pressure to get an old S3 card with an unsupported
RAMDAC working with 4.3 is not that strong. It would be nice to have 
- but not worth the effort.
Appearantly everybody has settled with that - well, so it will stay
unsupported for the future. 
I bet it would not even be too hard to do: The 3.3 code is still
exists. I myself have ported the neomagic driver to 4.0 without 
a single line of documentation - purely by looking at the 3.3 
driver. I'm sure other can do this, too.
 In case of the S3s some of the missing RAMDAC code is even there. 
The Tseng driver supports some of the RAMDACs which were also used
by S3. It should not be rocket science to modularize this code and 
make it available to other drivers.
So what are you guys waiting for? If you think you would like
to use your old card with 4.3, please don't hesitate! If you 
have questions feel free to ask me. I wont be able give a full 
lecture on C but I can to give you helpful hints where to look 
or how to proceed.


Egbert.