Subject: Re: Binary only drivers in sys?
To: Bruce J.A. Nourish <bjan+tech-kern@bjan.net>
From: Martin Husemann <martin@duskware.de>
List: tech-kern
Date: 08/25/2003 12:37:40
On Sun, Aug 24, 2003 at 07:41:50PM -0700, Bruce J.A. Nourish wrote:
> FreeBSD solved the problem by putting the non-BSD object in a contrib
> subdir. We don't have such a subdir for the kernel.

I have a similar problem with the (still unfinished) daic (ISDN) driver.
It requires to copy a vendor supplied binary to be copied into a kernel
source dir before the driver will build (the makefile then transforms that
binary into a header file, which is included by the driver mainline).

Having a standard "drop in" directory would be cool.

A LKM would not realy help in this case, because we wouldn't be allowed to
distribute the LKM. And if the user needs to recompile manually anyway, he
can as well have that binary be part of his kernel.

Martin