need advice for realtek in-house driver

Shuduo Sang shuduo.sang at canonical.com
Tue Jul 2 08:38:58 UTC 2013


Hi kernel guys,

My name is Shuduo Sang and I'm working on OEM preload project from OEM
team. I have worked on the bug #1155017 [1] and solved it by realtek
official in-house driver 8.36.0 from their website [2]. And I happened to
see Ubuntu 13.04 still has this issue. I compared the upstream r8169 driver
 with realtek in-house driver and see they are very different. And
according to realtek website, there is another driver for r8169 [3]. But in
upstream kernel, there is only one r8169 driver.

I can see contributor list in the head part of upstream r8168.c as below:

   1 /*
   2  * r8169.c: RealTek 8169/8168/8101 ethernet driver.
   3  *
   4  * Copyright (c) 2002 ShuChen <shuchen at realtek.com.tw>
   5  * Copyright (c) 2003 - 2007 Francois Romieu <romieu at fr.zoreil.com>
   6  * Copyright (c) a lot of people too. Please respect their work.

Seems original version submission was submitted by realtek engineer in 2002
then has been modified many times by community. So we expect lots of
difference between upstream version and in-house version.

We already learnt some lessons that the fix was in OEM but not in upstream then
the end user will meet this issue when they use Linux distro although it
has be fixed in OEM project. I guess community people might be not aware
realtek driver update but they should welcome patch submission from realtek.
But seems realtek is not much proactive to push their in-house driver to
upstream.

I'm not sure what we canonical can help on because of technical and legal
reason. So I send email to list for advice what we can do to integrate that
realtek in-house driver into Ubuntu distro if no way to push to upstream.

Regards,
Shuduo

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/sutton/+bug/1155017

[2] http://www.realtek
.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=13&PFid=5&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

[3] http://www.realtek
.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=13&PFid=4&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false&Downloads=true
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-team/attachments/20130702/9526a0c4/attachment.html>


More information about the kernel-team mailing list