Today another nice thing for the Linux kernel happened, we got working VME bus drivers and infrastructure submitted to the kernel tree. Now, I don't expect it to generate as much press as the Microsoft kernel driver thing did, but it should, as I feel it's more important in a way.

The VME bus code has lived outside of the kernel for many years, and there was at least three different implementations at the same time floating around. Martyn Welch from GE Faunc took the time, merged all of them together, and rounded up the different copyright holders of the code and got legal approval from all of them to properly release the code under the GPLv2.

Now as someone who has tried to do this kind of thing, I know how thankless and how difficult it can be. So here's a great big thank you to Martyn and his employer for getting this work done, and taking the time to work toward getting it merged into the main kernel tree.

The patches are here, here, here, here, and a good readme for the api is here.

posted Mon, 03 Aug 2009 in [/linux]