In the early 00s I bought a laptop that had an RTL 8188 CE card in it that ran awful under Linux. I forked his driver and made a number of changes to it and eventually got my wifi working really well (by doing things that could never be upstreamed due to legal/regulatory restrictions). Over the years I rebased often and reviewed the changes, and learned a lot from watching his code. It took a bit of getting used to, but a certain amount of beauty and appreciation emerged. One thing was very clear: This man was doing a lot of the work to keep the ship together. Even just keeping the driver compilable with each kernel release often took some non-trivial refactoring, which he did reliably and well.

Larry, you will be missed my friend. RIP.

If you are waiting to reach out to somebody, don't wait too long or it may suddenly be too late. The years can slip by in a flash.

These things are illegal for a reason.

I realise that the kernel contributors themselves are mostly volunteers and as such can just do what they want, and writers of non-upstreamed drivers will need to get used to chasing trunk, but to me this sort of thing seems like a waste of human talent. once something works, it should never not work again. it seems to me that despite all the layers of cruft that we've accumulated over the decades haven't really helped much with this, in fact they probably mean more work just to stay still.

Software is defined by its interfaces, and unlike userspace APIs, this guarantee does not apply to internal kernel APIs. The ability to update the latter is what enables the former. Inability to update internal implementation details inevitably leads to ossification and obsolescence of the whole system. Linus Torvalds spoke about this recently in the context of new Rust code in the kernel.

No, in practice I think it leads to growing complexity, because the system then adds additional APIs (e.g., v1, v2, v3, etc.) to support new features, but has to continue to maintain the old APIs for backwards compatibility, leading to lots of extra code and a huge maintenance burden.

Politics. Offering a stable-ish internal API would instantly lead to hardware vendors shipping closed source drivers for Linux.

Currently, you have to be the size of NVIDIA or AMD to be able to afford a closed source driver, it's simply a huge work to keep up with the constant improvements in the Linux kernel.

Embedded/mobile projects don't tend to use bleeding-edge kernels and stuck on one version regardless of closed source modules anyway.

It may be that in the hypothetical absence of a salary giving them an excuse, many of these individuals may also choose to volunteer, but it's wrong to call contributors "mostly volunteers" when that's their day job. Changesets from those known to be spending their own time on contributing are a relatively small fraction of the changes.

I've also fantasised about the same thing in application programming languages - e.g. the way racket runs loads of different dialects, you could also have versioning for different things running at the same time.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/larry-finger-linux-w...

I remember cursing ndis wrappers and Broadcom wifi ecosystem a long time ago, Larry helped fixed that, and mentored many others along the way.

quote from the arstechnica article "In a 2023 Quora response to someone asking if someone without "any formal training in computer science" can "contribute something substantial" to Linux, Finger writes, "I think that I have." Finger links to the stats for the 6.4 kernel, showing 172,346 lines of his code in it, roughly 0.5% of the total."

What do I think about? Why the hell did he volunteer his post work hours trying to do this menial job hardware thing. Did he not have a family or something? He did. And today they lost him.

I wondered the same, imagining some 40-something FTE frustrated with bureaucratic work projects and with a couple young kids. Guess what, this guy passed at 84! Which means the driver work happened in his 60+ years. I will be lucky if I can remember my name at that age. :-)

The inclusion of the fish in the tagline made me smile. There’s an innocence to the sentence that captures the image really well.

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> so Finger helped reverse-engineer the necessary specs by manually dumping and reading hardware registers

I really wanted to leave this quote here for all to see. The badassery of this act should not be underestimated.

I've done a little bit of work along those lines. Reverse engineering my laptop's features, writing my own free software to drive them from inside Linux, emailing the manufacturer asking for documentation and receiving user help pages. It was mostly USB stuff, the most well documented interface imaginable, and it was still hard. I simply cannot fathom how he reverse engineered this Wi-Fi stuff. That's just a huge inspiration for me, I hope I can get near his level some day.

Thank you so much for your work and RIP.

Anecdotally, on any laptop that I have seen with these kinds of issues (basically every new Intel laptop I bought between 2017 and 2020, which includes lot of weird no-name tablet-in-laptop-formfactor crap, but also ThinkPad X270), it progresses such that the WLAN becomes unusable in Windows but you would hardly even notice in Linux, where it just works.

[edit: obviously comparing Windows to Windows is nonsense, it works in _Linux_]

I can’t think of a more powerful engineering endorsement than saying he did a Herculean effort to manually keep it all working

Basically we’re all screwed now cause he was holding the whole thing up