Handhelds.org fork of kernel…

October 23rd, 2007

Today I wanted to check status support of TC6393XB companion chip (used in Zaurus SL-6000 for USB Host and few other things) in Linux kernel as the last working version which we (OpenEmbedded kernel hacking team) have is 2.6.17 (a bit old). Most of Google search results pointed to our patches so I tried to search also for “Toshiba Mobile I/O Controller” which also gave me pointer to handhelds.org fork of Linux kernel.

I fetched CVS HEAD (had to remind how to use it since most of projects which I use switched to Subversion or Git). After browsing their repository it looked like they have driver but marked as non functional so no use for me rather.

By curiousity I diffed handhelds.org fork against vanilla 2.6.21 (as hh.org kernel is still 2.6.21). Result was 10 megabytes file (with -X dontdiff -x CVS switches) — I wonder did they ever considered merging with upstream…

Michal

October 24th, 2007 at 22:16

Until June quite much work was done to go upstream with the kernel. It got frozen by the fact that mailing list (kernel-discuss) went down (and is still down). Without that You would probably see fewer MB of diff and the version would be up to date (2.6.23). This example shows how important “the community” is - the contact and positive relations (no issues inside the group).

Personally I hope it is going to get back to life soon….