From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from alogconduit1ah.ccr.net (ccr@alogconduit1ae.ccr.net [208.130.159.5]) by kvack.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id EAA26462 for ; Tue, 30 Mar 1999 04:34:31 -0500 Subject: [Conrad Sanderson ] a plea for standard bigphysarea in Linux MM From: ebiederm+eric@ccr.net (Eric W. Biederman) Date: 30 Mar 1999 00:55:42 -0600 Message-ID: Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: ------- Start of forwarded message ------- Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 14:50:19 -0500 (EST) From: Conrad Sanderson To: ebiederm+eric@ccr.net Subject: a plea for standard bigphysarea in Linux MM Message-ID: Hi. As an avid Linux user and a PhD student, I am writing this letter as a plea to "The Linux MM core team" and other developers to put standard bigphysarea functionality into the Linux kernel. For many years (since 1.3.7x) we have been relying on the bigphysarea patch to allow us to use devices such as the Matrox Meteor frame grabber. Uses of Linux for video capture is increasing rapidly, and it would be of great help to the users of Linux (and hence Linux popularity) to have the meteor driver as a standard part of the Linux kernel - however, this cannot occur because it relies on the bigphysarea patch. Linux needs this as standard functionality - the *BSD folks have this in their kernel. It is also annoying to have to make sure the bigphysarea patch applies and works correctly with the newest kernel. For example, the patch does not work on 2.2.x SMP machines. Most recently, I've corrected a problem with the meteor driver not working with the 2.2.3 kernel because of a slight change in the way the kernel handles modules - it would be nice to have this work acknowledged as part of the kernel proper. I rely on the Matrox Meteor board for my PhD work, and while the current support for it under Linux is sufficient for my purposes, things can be better if Linux supported more hardware, out of the box, which would be A Good Thing (tm). Conrad Sanderson - Microelectronic Signal Processing Laboratory Griffith University, Queensland, Australia http://hive.me.gu.edu.au/~cam/ <--- lab webcam http://wave.me.gu.edu.au/~csand/md/0soft.html ------- End of forwarded message ------- -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm my@address' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://humbolt.geo.uu.nl/Linux-MM/