[linux-audio-dev] Getting out of the software game

[Lee Revell]

On 3/14/07, Paul Davis <paul at linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 08:56 -0400, Paul Coccoli wrote:
>
> > Besides, what you want is probably impossible.  You can't have
> > pre-comiled, binary-only drivers *and* a custom kernel.
>
> in theory, you certainly can. but the kernel development team, and linus
> in particular, are not interested in an engineering effort/long term
> approach that makes this feasible. if you define a stable driver binary
> interface, you can change the kernel out around it and drivers keep
> working. linus has made it clear that he sees no reason to do this, and
> is perhaps even opposed to it for some possibly sound engineering
> arguments (though that is open to debate).

Binary drivers make the kernel impossible to debug, and if the kernel
devs created such a DBI, vendors would stop releasing open source
drivers and pretty soon Linux would be no more stable than Windows.
Why should Linux sacrifice stability just so vendors can keep their
hardware interfaces secret?

Lee