Linux Kernel Is Still Seeing Driver Work for the Macintosh II

The Linux kernel is seeing some modern work done to its driver for supporting the Apple Desktop Bus on Macintosh II era systems.

Along with the likes of

the Apple PowerBook 100 series seeing Linux driver improvements

once in a while, this Sunday developer Finn Thain sent out a set of patches improving the kernel's via-macii driver that contains "fixes for all known bugs" to this driver.

The via-macii device driver is for supporting ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) on Macintosh II era systems. Apple Desktop Bus is the proprietary interface used by Apple in the late 80's and 90's for connecting devices like keyboards and mice to the system rather than a PS/2 interface.

These

9 patches

fix all known bugs within the Macintosh II ADB driver support in the Linux kernel.

Besides testing the code within QEMU, this driver was in fact tested on real hardware too. The developer was testing on the Apple Macintosh Centris 650, the computer from 1993 that was clocked at 25MHz and had 4~24MB of RAM, 80~500MB HDD, and other leading features for the time.

Should you still be rocking a Macintosh II era system and having buggy Apple Desktop Bus behavior, besides these patches being material for Linux 5.9 if the review is done timely it's also marked for back-porting to Linux 5.0+ stable kernels.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3i2XDJY