Developer Corner[an error occurred while processing this directive]: Available Projects	Think Differently. Think MkLinux.
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This page contains a list of projects in need of volunteer developers. For information on current projects, check out the Developer Registry.

• USB Driver(*)
  This driver is used for supporting the Universal Serial Bus, as used in the iMac and Blue & White G3 desktop machines. While support for these machines is not anticipated in the near future, USB testing can be achieved using cards that have similar hardware designs.

• PCMCIA Driver(*)
  This driver is used for supporting various PCMCIA cards, a.k.a PC Cards, as used on various laptops. These machines are supported already. Care should be taken when writing machine-dependent code to ensure that OpenFirmware calls are used for determining addresses on PCI PowerBooks, and that #define statements (macros) are used for hard-coded addresses for hardware on NuBus laptops.

• 5380/53C80 Driver(**)
  This driver handles the SCSI controller on NuBus PowerBooks. The machine-independent (and to a degree, the machine-dependent) driver is ported from NetBSD-mac68k. What's missing is code to probe for devices on the bus (which must be rewritten and ported from one of the other MkLinux SCSI drivers) and some additional glue code. Also, various hardware addresses in the header files, etc. are bogus, because the actual values are not known. The developer or developers need to figure out these values, either through disassembling existing code or by contacting appropriate people within Apple and reminding them until the information is made available.

• MESH driver
  MkLinux has an existing driver for MESH SCSI hardware, as used in most PCI-based PowerMacs for the internal bus. It is fairly solid, but there are a handful of drives that cause it to generate a MESH trace log and die. This is a bug-hunting project, and basically requires that you own or obtain (buy, borrow, whatever) devices that cause failures.

• Generic SCSI driver
  A while back, David Gatwood attempted to write a generic SCSI driver, to allow non-disk SCSI devices to be used under MkLinux. The driver code exists and compiles, but the Mach Kernel side does not correctly register the device in some way, so vmlinux just refuses to do anything with it. This is mostly for someone interested in working with kernel/server interaction at a fairly high level. Portions of the code may or may not be correct as written, but regardless, this should probably be a fairly high level rewrite, requiring only a strong knowledge of C and a willingness to study the other aliases for the SCSI drivers and figure out what's missing in this one.

(*) Indicates that work has begun on porting drivers, but that the person (David A. Gatwood) working on support is working on several other higher priority projects and would gladly let someone else take over, preferrably someone with more time to devote to these projects.

(**) Indicates that work is in a compilable state, but that machine-dependent glue code is needed. For this purpose, it would be beneficial for future work to be done by a developer with the hardware in question, preferrably someone with a knowledge of assembly language, in order to find critical hardware addresses that are missing.

For more information about these projects, to add a project to this list, or to take over a preexisting project above, contact David A. Gatwood.

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