15 Mar
2007
15 Mar
'07
6:30 p.m.
On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 10:21 -0400, Lee Revell wrote:
On 3/14/07, Paul Davis
<paul(a)linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote:
I think the "engineering argument" also goes in the direction that
creating a stable binary interface would preclude big changes in the way
the kernel works internally once it is in place, (ie: keeping backwards
compatibility with it would hinder progress).
-- Fernando
On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 08:56 -0400, Paul Coccoli
wrote:
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? 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).