November Status

November 21, 2006 - We continue to generate compile summaries for each new release of the mainline kernel via our Patch Lifecyce Manager (PLM) system. A summary of these statistics can be found at http://www4.testing.osdl.org/summary. We've also began generating driver specific compile summaries for the various drivers we are monitoring. These can be found at http://www4.testing.osdl.org/summary/drivers.html

November 8, 2006 - Another OSDL Desktop Linux survey was recently introduced (November 6, 2008) and there have been over 2000 responses already. One question asked in the survey was to rate the most critical areas that the Desktop Work Group should focus on for 2007. At the top of the list was Open Drivers. Seems like everyone has something to say about it. But if you want to see the list itself, take the survey. After completing the survey, there is a link you can click to see the current results. Go ahead, take the survey.

August Status

August 23, 2006 - The August 18, 2006 blog posting mentioned the creation of a new mailing list and wiki to continue further discussions that came out of the Open Source Testing Summit that was held in San Francisco. For those of you who are interested, information regarding the mailing list can be found here: https://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/test-tools. The initial wiki is located here: http://developer.osdl.org/dev/test_tools.

August 18, 2006 - LWE SF held two sessions which were of interest to the Open Drivers Project. The first was an Open Source Testing Summit. It was a 3 hour session consisting of ~2hrs of 10min lightning talks from various individuals within the testing community and ~1hr of open discussion. Projects like Coverity, Autotest, Crucible, ABAT, STP etc. were all able to come together to discuss what each project was focusing on and where we could all begin collaborating. It was decided to begin a new mailing list and wiki to continue further discussions. The second session was the Open Drivers Sessions. IT was a 2hr block consisting of a quick project update followed by an open forum of discussing future project goals: document translations and connecting with the scsi community about the testing we are doing. Although the attendance was low, we gained good feedback from the audience.

August 1, 2006 - The Open Drivers Summit took place last week in Beaverton, OR. The speakers covered a wide variety of topics ranging from legal issues, to managing open source projects, to developers' perspectives when working in open source. Copies of the presentations can be found here: http://developer.osdl.org/dev/opendrivers/summit2006. We hope to have the audio of the presentations posted there shortly as well. On the driver testing front, we keep making good progress. Some of us were able to attend OLS and struck up some good conversations and made good contacts with other individuals in the testing community. We plan on working more with the autotest project in the future. In the meantime we have PLM successfully doing automated compile tests of the latest kernel.org mainline tree as well as the latest scsi misc and rc-fixes branches. We then have STP automatically kicking off tests against each of the new releases. We've also got the old linstab page back up and showing some of the latest PLM compile results. We're also generating a summary page for some of the latest tests we're running: http://www4.testing.osdl.org/odt_results.html

June Status

June 28, 2006 - The Open Drivers Summit is quickly coming together. T his mini conference is focusing on educating companies on how to open source their drivers for Linux. It's specifically looking to provide training for managers and program managers. The conference will take place Tuesday July 25, 2006 at OSDL in Beaverton, OR. For more information please visit http://developer.osdl.org/dev/opendrivers/wiki/index.php/training/open_drivers_summit

June 19, 2006 - Some of us attended FreedomHEC in Seattle, WA at the end of May. There were some great presentations on the social aspects of the kernel community as well as how to write a real working device driver. However, the most important meeting for us was getting to sit down with one of the LSI kernel developers who walked us through the test plan they had provided us. It was very helpful and we are currently trying to develop tests from it and also starting to run existing open source tests against their hardware they provided. Another conference directed towards educating program managers and line managers about working with Linux and Open Source is also in the works. We're trying to align the conference with OSCON and will probably hold it Tuesday, July 25 (hopefully at the Convention Center that OSCON is being held). For more details on the agenda of this conference please see: http://lists.osdl.org/pipermail/os_drivers/2006-June/000186.html. One more note is that Novell made an announcement about their improved device driver process making it easier for partners and customers to integrate hardware and software with Linux. The announcement can be found here: http://www.novell.com/news/press/item.jsp?id=662.

May Status

May 23, 2006 - We just received some SCSI Implementation docs for the Linux 2.6.x kernel from Samdeep Nayak. Thanks! We've also been working on getting LCOV (LTP's GCOV extension) up and running to get some code coverage analysis for the kernel. We then intend to apply this analysis to some of the drivers we will be testing. Some sample output can be seen here. We're also been helping with some testing and development of the Linux::Bootloader perl module that has been released to cpan.

May 3, 2006 - Scripts were written to automatically generate an online version of the kernel docbook for every new kernel release. We're gathering data for the Driver Matrix project request and have targeted work to begin on this in July, 2006. The biggest set of news comes in the area of driver testing. We continue to receive hardware donations and are building up the test lab. We received a test plan from LSI and have started to browse through it - we still need some hardware in order to execute tests. We've also started using the Autotest client side testing framework as well as the Open Test Framework to run some tests like LTP.

March Status

March 27, 2006 - There is a conference that is starting to come together directed towards hardware engineers and driver developers wanting to learn more about how to get involved with Linux and Open Source. It will take place on May 26th and 27th in Seattle, WA. For more information visit: http://freedomhec.pbwiki.com/

March 07, 2006 - There has been debate as to whether or not another Open Drivers Session should be held at LWE in Boston this April. There has not been much response for wanting to have it. Another thought has been proposed to hold a separate forum altogether away from LWE. On a different note, driver testing is well on it's way. We are busy acquiring hardware and setting it up to begin driver testing. We have also been promised to be given a test plan from a certain company by the beginning of next month (I won't name names yet as I haven't asked permission). So stay tuned!

February Status

February 03, 2006 - Many thanks to the individuals who have contributed content to the wiki. Along with these contributions we've also added a Project Roadmap page as well as a Donation Requests page.

January Status

January 18, 2006 - We've added a link to our wiki page from the left side navigation menu. We're also now directly linking to the corresponding wiki pages from the navigation menu. The Documentation link has been reorganized into a more functionally logical help page. The documents should now flow in the order from Uber-noob to more advanced hacker.

January 16, 2006 - We've continued to update links to the site and add additional pointers. Also, the wiki page is up and starting to resemble the web site. We'll soon be linking directly to the wiki from this web page. We're also beginning to look into device driver testing and starting work on the Driver Matrix that was a project request posted to the mailig list. An additional task that we'd like to tackle is to write out a project roadmap so that everyone can see where the project is heading and what our future goals are.

December Status

December 9, 2005 - We've populated the Sound section with some documents as well as adding a link to information for printer manufacturers needing Linux support. We also received a comprehensive test plan for the Neterion 10GbE Adaptor thanks to Leonid Grossman of Neterion. The DCL tech board held a Face to Face meeting this week and we were able to grab some of their time to get some some great feedback for improvements to this site.

December 2, 2005 - Added additional documentation links for some kernel docs as well as populating the Tools section with links to some driver databases. We also added a Project Requests link to inform readers what projects have been proposed and where the status is on those requests. MediaWiki was also installed and we are currently working on the formatting and content for those pages before we link to them from the main page.

November Status

November 23, 2005 - We broke out the left navigation toolbar into individual sections for better organization. We are slowly beginning to populate these sections with new information.

November 18, 2005 - Along with additional information and material being added to the site, an RSS feed has been set up. You can now aggregate news from the Open Drivers site via the following URL:

• http://developer.osdl.org/dev/opendrivers/opendrivers.rss

Web Site Now Available

November 11, 2005 - This web site is launched. It is populated with initial articles and training materials to help device driver developers get accustomed to the methods and processes of the linux kernel community.