Sometimes kernel developers find themselves competing with each other to get their version of a particular feature into the kernel. But sometimes developers discover they’ve been working along very similar lines, and the only reason they hadn’t been working together was that they just didn’t know each other existed.
Recently, Jian-Hong Pan asked if there was any interest in a LoRaWAN subsystem he’d been working on. LoRaWAN is a commercial networking protocol implementing a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) allowing relatively slow communications between things, generally phone sensors and other internet of things devices. Jian-Hong posted a link to the work he’d done so far:https://github.com/starnight/LoRa/tree/lorawan-ndo/LoRaWAN.
He specifically wanted to know “should we add the definitions into corresponding kernel header files now, if LoRaWAN will be accepted as a subsystem in Linux?” The reason he was asking was that each definition had its own number. Adding them into the kernel would mean the numbers associated with any future LoRaWAN subsystem would stay the same during development.
However, Marcel Holtmann explained the process:
Read more at Linux Journal
