Re:grain of salt (Score 1)

You should get your facts right.

Compaq Research Labs is not and never was banned from posting patches to him. If you look at rmk's latest patches you will see that he merged quite some Ipaq specific stuff.

I know what you're talking about: a year ago there was a flamewar going on about the SA1100 serial drivers between Russell and Compaq's George France. Both are pretty strong characters, and at a certain point Russell posted that he would put CRL in his personal killfile. At that point I stepped in and stopped the flamewar.

The serial driver stuff is pretty much resolved right now, it even had a positive ending: the serial drivers in linux-2.5 will almost certainly be based on the ideas that arose after this accident.

Your gcc remark is also not true. If you look up the "possible compiler bug" thread in the linux-arm mailing list archive, you can read that he uses Red Hat's gcc-2.96-80 to compile kernels.

I'm glad you like Nicolas Pitre's work, but as you might now Nico only maintains the SA-11x0 port (and works on the XScale). Russell maintains the complete ARM Linux tree, so as you can see Russell and Nico have to work pretty close together. They also pretty much agree on the linux-arm* mailing lists

The good news for you is that Russell integrated quite a large amount of Nico's patch in his latest kernels. See rmk's changelog.