start of some pci cleanups

Alan Coopersmith Alan.Coopersmith at Sun.COM
Mon Jul 25 12:25:25 PDT 2005


Jesse Barnes wrote:
> If vendors would just submit their drivers with an open source license 
> to the tree, we could fix them all up at once when changes like this 
> were made...

Even if they all could be convinced to do so, binary compatibility is
still useful - it allows open source driver maintainers like Alan
Hourihane to post i810 binaries on his web site for users to test
bug fixes without having to worry about which X server version they've
installed or forcing them to replace the entire X server just to test
a driver fix.

In any case, the X server has ABI versioning for a reason - if you're
going to break the ABI, be sure to change the ABI versioning correctly,
so users can get a "This module is incompatible" message when they try
to load a driver instead of reporting strange crashes because their driver
passed ints to a function now expecting a pointer to a struct.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering



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