Ask Linux users what they find most annoying about Linux, and many will complain about device drivers. While the vast majority of PC components and peripherals work with Linux, some don't work at all, and others are marginal. A leading Linux kernel developer has come up with a solution. In a recent blog and e-mail posting, kernel hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote, "The Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development. No longer do you have to suffer through all of the different examples in the Linux Device Driver Kit, or pick through the thousands of example drivers in the Linux kernel source tree trying to determine which one is the closest to what you need to do." That's a significant point. While many hardware vendors don't want to open up their devices' APIs (application programming interfaces) and ABIs (application binary interfaces) to the open-source community, it's often not because they have any real secret ingredient.
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