Linux Kernel Ethernet

This page documents Ethernet drivers on the Linux kernel. Typically Ethernet drivers are documented through the Documentation/ section of the kernel. This page is for those drivers that choose to document themselves through a wiki rather than plain text ASCII files. This follows the tradition of documentation followed by the wireless subsystem.

Ethernet drivers

Here is the list of our wiki-documented Ethernet drivers. alx - Qualcomm Atheros (QCA) Ethernet driver.

About Driver Backport Workgroup

The Driver Backport workgroup creates distribution-independent means to create, distribute, maintain and support backports of current upstream drivers on the older kernels of Linux distributions.

The goal is to make Linux distributions run easily on anything that can run Linux at the day it comes to market.

Once a driver has been backported it needs to be precompiled to the distro kernel for distribution.

This should work as similar as possible accross the different distributions so system and component vendors can focus their energies from adding Linux support to more distros to adding Linux support to more hardware.

Once backported drivers have been built into packages, these packages need to be distributed to the "sysadmin" so installation works as easy as possible for him.

While the Linux user doesn't care too much about different installation methods accross distributions and there is some happy coopetition in this, the hardware vendor techsupport would strongly prefer to have distro agnostic diagnostic tools to check the driver status.

There is many ways how to manage the growing delta between the some current kernel API and the API of an older, distro specific kernel.

This page collects the specific issues, how different people deal with them and from there we come up with some best practices how to do it with least effort.

As we anticiapte distro differences in the kernel even once we have these best practices, this page also lists the distro specifics of the kernels.

So in one sentence the scope of this effort is

                  Driver Life Cycle

[ This is a DRAFT version, under construction ]

DRAFT: This page is under construction

Purpose

This is the source code for the "Hello World" sample module referenced by Sample KMP spec file.

Purpose

Create a standard KMP spec file for the Driver Backport Working Group.

Starting Point