Linux Plumbers Conf 2010

One Line Summary

Abstract

It seems like everyone and their dog has mobile broadband in their laptop, on their phone, or with a dongle in their pocket. But often these devices don’t work well in Linux and there’s no consistent API that app developers can target. Devices may work well enough for advanced users, but the stack provides plenty of gaps through which a seamless experience often falls to its death.

Many devices use proprietary protocols we need to reverse-engineer to provide full functionality that users of other operating systems are accustomed to. Devices themselves exhibit huge variation in firmware, stability, connection method, and standards conformance. And it’s not just AT commands, PPP, and wvdial anymore; many embedded devices and laptop cards provide ethernet-like interfaces that require more complicated kernel drivers which manufacturers often don’t release.

Even talking to the device isn’t enough since users expect features like location services, messaging, and voice communication to work just as well as IP networking does. We don’t provide a consistent mechanism for access to these services, hampering their adoption further up the stack.

Our users demand solutions to all these problems, and it’s our job to make sure they are solved in a robust, maintainable, and flexible manner. From hardware and drivers all the way up to the user experience, I’ll discuss problems and potential solutions at each stop along the way.

Tags

kernel, drivers, Embedded, redhat, wwan, net

Speaker

• Dan Williams

  Red Hat
  • Blog: http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/

  Biography

  Daniel C. B. Williams is a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat with a focus on networking from hardware and drivers to userland and experience. He was hired to work on OpenOffice, started NetworkManager during the usability dark years, was loaned to OLPC for a while, and subsequently began wrestling the Linux networking stack into finishing-move position.