[RFC] New driver information

From: Heikki Orsila
Date: Fri Feb 16 2007 - 08:59:11 EST


I just read

http://kerneltrap.org/node/7729

and it occured to me that it would be informative to have a new device
driver macro. The motivation for the new macro would be 4 issues:

* Is it possible to get specifications for the device?
* If yes, under what terms? (nda, public)
* Where to get public specs?
* How many closed and open drivers in the Linux source tree?

I suggest to add following macro:

MODULE_SPECIFICATION(terms, source);

where "terms" is one of

* MODULE_SPEC_ANY_PARTY_NDA
- specification available to any party for an NDA
* MODULE_SPEC_ANY_PARTY
- specification available in public, or at least available
without NDA to any party
* MODULE_SPEC_RESTRICTED
- none of the above

and "source":

* contact address for nda specs
* any public source for a public specification (http://, email address,
...)
* empty string otherwise

I realise this macro somewhat circumvents the purpose of Documentation/
directory but the idea is to have a direct 1:1 mapping between drivers
and specification sources so that it would be easy to collect statistics
of "open" hardware by using grep et al.

What do you think? Useless annotations or useful information?

--
Heikki Orsila Barbie's law:
heikki.orsila@xxxxxx "Math is hard, let's go shopping!"
http://www.iki.fi/shd
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