A couple suggestions

Posted May 11, 2017 0:14 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803)
Parent article: 4.12 Merge window part 2

I have a couple suggestions for the kernel merge window articles.

1) You've been publishing these on Wednesdays with your weekly edition; that splits it up into three articles -- the second covering a full week of merges but the first and third covering a half a week. The new LWN format lends itself to splitting it up into two equal sections (by time anyway), perhaps published on Monday morning.

2) All the new hardware support. I like it, but would like to see more. A list of the names of things supported means only a little. A bit more about these new things would be great. Can they do anything particularly interesting? Who would care about them -- desktop/laptop/phone users, datacenter managers, single-board computer tinkerers?

Thanks!

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A couple suggestions

Posted May 11, 2017 14:02 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

We have pondered adjusting the timing of these articles. For this cycle, we decided to keep the edition timing, but that might well change in the future.

The other suggestion is rather harder to act upon. It's quite a bit of work just to come up with the list of newly supported hardware; driver authors, for whatever reason, often do not go out of their way to make that obvious. Trying to document why somebody might be interested in a new pulse-width modulator controller would expand that work considerably. For the most part, the drivers are of interest to somebody who has a computer with that specific device and wants it to work...

A couple suggestions

Posted May 12, 2017 0:38 UTC (Fri) by fratti (subscriber, #105722) [Link]

>A bit more about these new things would be great. Can they do anything particularly interesting?

You can read the data sheets for that. Figuring out what each chip brings to the table would require the author to have knowledge of the entire field these chips are used in. A lot of these drivers are for embedded use cases, so the one who cares about the drivers the most are the hardware vendors and the people building products based on the chips.