why are these drivers missing from the Fedora kernel?

[Josh Boyer]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 1:09 PM, Ranjan Maitra
<maitra.mbox.ignored at inbox.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Thank you. I am sorry that my previous e-mail was not clear.
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: jwboyer at fedoraproject.org
>> Sent: Tue, 30 Jun 2015 08:34:27 -0400
>> To: maitra.mbox.ignored at inbox.com
>> Subject: Re: why are these drivers missing from the Fedora kernel?
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 5:07 PM, Ranjan Maitra
>> <maitra.mbox.ignored at inbox.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I posted this earlier but did not get a response, so here's hoping that
>>> someone who notices has more suggestions.
>>
>> Most likely because what you've written doesn't make a whole lot of
>> sense.  Your email address also makes it look like you ignore it :).
>
> Yes, I do ignore this e-mail address, but not the mailing list. I read it on another e-mail address but post using this one. It is my way of keeping spam down.
>
>>
>>> I am a long-time Fedora user since Fedora Core 1 and I am looking at
>>> installing Fedora 22 on a MS Surface Pro 3 with Type Cover. But in order
>>> to do that (and to have the cover recognized), I noticed that the file
>>> linux-***/drivers/hid/hid-ids.h in the kernel from kernel.org is
>>> missing. This is however available at kcbench (which is the
>>
>> Missing from where?  What package are you referring to, because the
>> file is certainly in the kernel sources.
>
> I agree. The kernel is indeed in the vanilla kernel sources. However, it is not installed with the fedora kernel.

Because it is a source file, and the kernel package provides binaries.
The hid-ids.h file is internal to the kernel sources.  It is in the
Fedora kernel sources, just as it is in the vanilla kernel.org
sources.

> So why does this matter? The MS Surface Type Cover 3 is not recognized at all with a Fedora 22 installation. It is recognized however, in distributions like kUbuntu. There, the dmesg gives:
>
>
> [    1.866285] usb 1-3: new full-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
> [    1.994694] usb 1-3: No LPM exit latency info found, disabling LPM.
> [    1.996342] usb 1-3: New USB device found, idVendor=045e, idProduct=07e2
> [    1.996346] usb 1-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
> [    1.996349] usb 1-3: Product: Surface Type Cover
> [    1.996351] usb 1-3: Manufacturer: Microsoft

Can you provide the full output of dmesg from the kernel that displays
that?  Can you also provide the full output of dmesg from the Fedora
kernel?

> Such a dmesg does not show up with Fedora 22 LiveCD.

Because upstream doesn't have support for device ID 07e2, which is
what your cover is reporting.  Which means whatever distribution you
saw that with above is carrying an out of tree patch.

> So I looked this up:
>
> ~$ sudo dnf provides */hid-ids.h
> Last metadata expiration check performed 3:56:27 ago on Tue Jun 30 08:06:19 2015.
> kcbench-data-4.0-0.1-16.fc22.noarch : Kernel sources from 4.0 to be used by
>                                     : kcbench
> Repo        : fedora
>
> You can see that the file is in kcbench-data (which, btw, is 525 M addiitionally (!) when installed).

That is irrelevant.  I have no idea what kcbench-data is, but it doesn't matter.

> I just wonder why the files/drivers are in the kernel (from kernel.org) but are not there in the Fedora 22 kernel. They seem to be there in the Ubuntu kernels.

You keep stating this incorrectly.  The files are in the kernel
sources in Fedora.  They are not missing.  However, they do not have
support for the device ID your cover is reporting.

> Please let me know if I have still not been clear. I am happy to explain (and test). I would like to use F22 on my Surface Pro 3).

You might have success with that if we can track down the patch that
adds support for that device, but it will need to come via an update
after installation.

josh