Drivers under Linux - better or worse?

This article was published by me in a mailing list in August 2000. It concerns the situation of hardware drivers in Linux and whether they offer superior performace and/or quality compared to other (commercial) systems.

"... To be more clear in my question, I mean are Open Source Drivers going to provide better performance/quality in areas like video cards and etc?"

In a way.

You see, the people using Linux write drivers because (a) they want to use their hardware, and (b) they are having fun hacking. People in companies write drivers because they _have_ to, there is almost never a personal interest in writing _good_ software as long as you get paid.

In Russia architects were at times being forced to live in the top storey of the houses they built, and while being somewhat brutal, that makes kind of sense. That's why I always advocate the idea of all Microsoft employees being forced to use Microsoft software only. That ought to create a little more personal interest in creating something useable.

There are three distinct advantages in Open Source drivers, and in my opinion, they beat the disadvantages in the long run:

Nobody's telling you when to stop.

Have you ever owned a piece of hardware which the manufacturer no longer supports? That is not possible with an Open Source driver. Companies want you to buy their newer products, and of course writing drivers is expensive (because the developers need to be paid _really_ well to write something that they usually don't give a damn about themselves). So companies stop supporting older products.

With Linux, you can nowadays expect to get drivers for WD80x3 ISA 8bit network cards, including software IRQ setup utilities, that work much better and faster than some current 3COM PCI models. (I know, I have one of those in our routers that has an uptime of >200 days, and THAT was a power outage.) The driver will be continued as long as people WANT IT. Not as long as the company needs to drag it along. And if Hacker A gives up on it, Hacker B will probably start continuing on it. And if all else fails, and you urgently need a bugfix, hire one of the 500,000 Linux hackers that are available world wide - the source code is available to improve on it and it is usually well documented. (Number pulled out of my ass) Try that with a commercial driver for hardware that is "no longer supported", but which you depend on.

Nobody's telling you what to do.

You probably know the Hauppauge WinTV cards. They work perfectly under Linux, including Premiere decoding (which I of course have never tried out, these are just rumours :-). The WinTV Software for Windows, at least the European version, can record AVIs up to 320x240. That is a software limitation, because if it were able to record full PAL, there would be an extra fee on it because it would be a "recording device" (there is a law about this). Guess what resolution some of the available Linux software records at.

You might also know 3DFX. Have you ever heard of a driver for Windows that makes the 3DFX memory available as swap space, as long as the card is not used for 3D? That's 8 or 12 or 32 MB of extra RAM, a little slower than the other RAM but it _does_ make a difference. Yeah, ok, it's a hacker project, but so what? It _CAN_ be done.

Driver problems are easy to deal with - if you know how.

I'm told most of the crashes Windows users experience are due to "broken drivers". The general problem with binary drivers is that they can _never_ fit 100% into the system, because the company simply cannot afford writing extra drivers for all the Windows versions available, with or without what extension or other driver installed. Many drivers stop working when you have a SMP system or don't work in embedded Windows. Linux does it all with one driver. [Did you know there are 9 different versions of Windows2000, with more differences than there are between the main Linux distributions?]

When someone writes a driver for Linux, and it is working well, it normally gets incorporated into the main Kernel, where Alan Cox, Donald Becker and all the big-time gurus start brooding over it first. If it _really_ works (which most of the time means at least a partial rewrite by one of them) THEN it goes into the main kernel tree.

Remember Soundblaster LIVE? Creative published closed-binary drivers first, and they were only for one specific kernel version, and "could" theoretically work with other versions, but there had to be extra modules for SMP, for large memory systems, for each architecture (UP/SMP), and so on ... It worked "sort-of,some-of-the-time".

When it was (finally!) opensourced, Alan Cox spent two nights over it (look into his diary), and then sent back a complete rewrite, much cleaner and better adopted to current kernel changes. Imagine Creative's surprise and delight when they found out that someone was doing THEIR work, and for free!

An open source driver will be carried along with the kernel, and all the company must actually do is publish enough information for others to know HOW to access the hardware, AND of course do a little marketing so that people will WANT to have the hardware. I'll take the latter as granted ;)

Disadvantages

The disadvantages are that Linux drivers normally lag a little behind the Windows versions, because most hardware gets released when Windows drivers are ready - and only THEN can Linux users start developing their own drivers. Performance normally is no issue, current NVidia cards (Geforce, etc) are even faster under Linux, because the drivers are new and cleanly written, in contrast to the Windows drivers.

The only problem is when some company just plainly refuses to publish their APIs or programming information. The reasons they give are mostly completely hollow - nobody is going to "take their intellectual property away", and please how exactly can a competitor profit from a piece of paper that says that some chip needs data in such-and-such format and activates an interrupt when done?

So, don't expect _good_ Linux drivers from stupid companies, like Mustek for example. But I wouldn't buy their stuff anyway, not even if I were using Windows.