Does Xorg need the kernel's DRM?

[Hal V. Engel]

On Wednesday 22 April 2009 11:56:20 am Jeremy Huddleston wrote:
> (Gentoo has sys-kernel/linux-
> headers for example) over anything installed with 'make  
> headers_install' straight from the kernel source.
>
> The main reason to install those headers is for recompiling glibc  
> anyways...

Yes and starting with kernel 2.6.26 there are major conflicts between the time 
related kernel headers and the glibc time related headers (which have not 
changed since kernel version 2.2) and this has not been addressed in the 
relevant gentoo packages and as far as I know no distro has addressed the 
issue and neither has the glibc team.  The result is that ntp is incorrectly 
built for kernels >=2.6.26 and it does not function correctly.  What happens 
is that ntp is built for a microsecond kernel but starting with 2.6.26 the 
linux kernel is a nanosecond kernel and this mismatch causes the time keeping 
to be unstable.  

Not that ntp and time keeping are issues of direct interest here.  I am just 
trying to point out the there are times when there are significant conflicts 
between the kernels headers and headers from other system libraries and that 
it can be difficult or impossible for users and distros to sort things out.  
For example there is an open bug report in the gentoo bug tracker for this 
issue (timex.h mismatch) that has been there since just after the release of 
2.6.26.   See http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237974 for more details.

Hal