Re: Question on driver availability / backports
On Thu, Feb 05, 2009 at 11:39:35PM +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 13:39 +0100, Rainer Koenig wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > quick introduction of myself: The guy that is repsonsible to bring Linux
> > on the desktop PCs at Fujitsu Siemens Computers.
Hi, welcome!
> > Now my question: I tried to install the latest Lenny netinstall snapshot
> > on our current destkop models today, but unfortunately this snapshot is
> > missing the support for the Intel Boazman LAN in e1000e. Boazman is
> > device ID 8086:10df.
> >
> > Yes, I understand the issues of freezes and that Lenny will come with a
> > 2.6.26 kernel that doesn't support this device. So my concern is about
> > how I can support our customers that still want to use Debian on actual
> > PC hardware.
>
> Does this device require new code in the driver, or is it sufficient to
> add the new id to its device id table? In the latter case I expect that
> it could be added in a stable update.
Even if its new code we might be able to allow it - we just have to
have very high confidence that it won't break existing installs. For
example, adding code that only gets executed on previously-unsupported
devices, or being able to sufficiently test your changes on all
devices it affects.
If you can point us to the git changesets that enable this device, we
can review them.
> > So a few questions, I hope that this mailing list is the correct one to
> > ask this:
> >
> > 1. Is there a sort of "driver backport" group that takes care of such
> > issues? Or is the concept behind debian to move forward to newer kernels
> > to obtain hardware support?
>
> We don't backport drivers into the linux-2.6 package. Newer kernel
> versions are likely to be made available in the lenny-backports suite of
> www.backports.org, though this is not yet an official service.
>
> > 2. Is there a mechanism to replace drivers during installation.
> > Imagining I would get a working e1000e module somehow I still would need
> > to make it usable on the installation process, at the moment all I can
> > think of is adding it by hand to the proper modules/../updates directory
> > and inserting it by hand. Looks not like an easy to use setup. :-)
> > Ok, maybe this is more for the debian-boot mailing list, is it?
> [...]
>
> Yes, this is for debian-boot.
If you want to distribute a module that is an updated version of the
one we provide for use with the lenny kernel, you might consider
creating a module-source package which is compatible with
module-assistant and drops the resulting module in the updates
dir. That won't make the driver available at install time, but its
better than not working at all :)
--
dann frazier
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