On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, David Dawes wrote:
>
> Does this go any way towards explaining why it seems to be getting harder
> and harder to build modules outside of the kernel source tree while
> still leveraging the kernel build mechanism?
No. That is explained by the inevitable lack of testing, I think.
Modules outside of the kernel can (by definition) not be tested by people
who work on the kernel. It's not made any better by the fact that the
outside modules tend to do horribly bad things because they try to be
compatible across different configuration managers etc, so they tend to be
quite fragile in the first place.
> Is the ability to build modules located outside of the kernel source
> tree a consideration at all in the kernel module build process, or am I
> going down the wrong path with this?
It's certainly never been a consideration for the kernel proper, partly
because the outside projects have never even tried to make it a
consideration. And some outside projects have been totally misguided and
seriously broken wrt kernel coding styles, making them actively disliked
by the regular kernel people.
(For example, the original OSS code eventually tried to evolve into a
thing that encouraged binary module compatibility through the use of a
shim layer designed for that - which is against all the design goals of a
regular kernel).
NOTE! It may be impossible to really solve this problem. A lot of the
things that outside modules want are _by_design_ something the kernel
proper does not like.
In particular, the kernel proper has always put "clean source code" at a
much higher priority than "source-level compatibility within the kernel".
So I encourage people to just switch around interfaces when that fixes
some internal problem - rather than add a new "new interface" and leaving
the old ones dangling for compatibility.
(On the other hand, the system call ABI compatibility to user space is
sacred, and outweighs any in-kernel beauty issues.)
In other words: external projects have usually not worked very well. They
often end up doign the wrong thing technically exactly _because_ they are
external, and can't easily upgrade to modern interfaces because they want
to be compatible with old systems. I don't really see that changing to any
major degree.
Linus
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