Connecting new hardware to the Linux market: Ed Cashin

Coraid's lightweight, low-budget storage technology is establishing itself at innovative IT shops, thanks to the company's participation in the Linux driver process. Ed Cashin, the developer behind Coraid's Linux driver, talks about how the company made the connection.

By Don Marti, LinuxWorld.com, 03/20/07

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Don Marti, LinuxWorld: So tell me a little bit about Coraid and the hardware that the company makes.

Ed Cashin, Coraid: We are a small but growing company. And we’re located on both coasts of the United States.And we have been around for a few years now, doing scalable network storage that we make available to folks, usually Linux folks, but also other people, by way of open source software.

LinuxWorld: The first I heard about Coraid was when I saw your name and e-mail address go by in a kernel changelog. Can you tell me a little bit about the process of getting the open source driver for Coraid’s ATA over Ethernet into the kernel?

Cashin: Well sure, it really happened before I was working at Coraid. I got a chance to follow the linux-kernel mailing list and noticed who was who and how the patches usually flowed through the mailing list and through the different kernel trees. And then once I started working at Coraid, it became apparent what needed to be done.

A lot of that was the fact that the kernel folks were really trying to articulate what needed to be done. And part of that was the work by Greg Kroah-Hartman, who was trying to codify a lot of the style and principles of design that go into drivers. And he was trying to make it easier for driver developers to get into the kernel. And so, one of the ways he did that was to create some new documentation and update some old documentation. So Greg was asking for people to do exactly what we wanted to do.

I went to the Ottawa Linux Symposium and finally tracked down Greg on the last night. And met him and he was very friendly and helpful. And basically, it just consisted of getting a loop started where we got our kernel driver ready and tried to make it fit the design principles of the Linux kernel and be acceptable to the kernel community. And we submitted it.

They had a lot of feedback. Some of it, they wanted to know, "Why do you do this? Why do you do that?" Some of it was suggestions on things that could be made better or things that could be improved so that it would fit better with the rest of the kernel. We took those suggestions, implemented them in our driver, resubmitted and after a couple of iterations of that loop, we saw folks start to push our patches up towards Linus Torvalds. And from then on, they started coming back out to the distributions: Red Hat, SUSE and everyone.

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