Clarification of loadable drivers

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2004-06-30 at 17:06 +0100, Jono Bacon wrote:
> It strikes me that if we are going to face issues allowing modules from 
> different version of 2.6.x to work with each other, this is going to be 
> a major stumbling block. I would have thought that 2.6 would preserve 
> ABI compatibility across the different minor releases, but I may be 
> wrong, hence the question. :P
> 

My opinion is that this is not too big a problem. 

First, I think that installing drivers is really something you should be
careful about e.g. personally I want .deb or .rpm from someone that I
trust, e.g. my OS vendor or a 3rd party repository. And binary-only
drivers, like for NVidia, is usually packaged into native packages these
days so even this can be solved.

Second, with enough automation a 3rd party package repository could
automatically rebuild e.g. nvidia or ntfs kernel modules whenever the OS
vendor releases a new kernel. So your update of the OS would be blocked
until all your package dependencies are OK, e.g. you can't update to
kernel-2.8.42-501 before kernel-module-nvidia-99.54-2.8.42-501 is
available. [1] 

Sure, it's a pain for hardware vendors with closed drivers to fight the
changing ABI (and ABI stability does come a price). I, for a multitude
of reasons, wouldn't like to encourage hardware vendors to distribute
drivers outside the kernel source code. 

But, hey, that's just my opinion :-)

Cheers,
David

[1] : Sure, this is a pain if you need updates here and now, but maybe
you shouldn't be relying on closed source drivers then?



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