It seems to me that Linus' technical argument is indeed being mostly ignored.
While breaking the ABI is unfortunate, the real problem that Linus complained about is that you can't install several userspace versions side-by-side. This means that if you install your new kernel and userspace, reboot, and find the new kernel doesn't work for some reason, you can't just go back to the old kernel and have working X, because you just replaced userspace with a version that no longer works with the kernel that worked correctly. This is even worse for distributions that want to upgrade the kernel, because each kernel package would need to have a Depends on the exact userspace package version. Thus, the package manager would remove the older kernel when the new one is installed (since they depend on different versions of the same userspace package). If the new kernel somehow doesn't work, the user is totally screwed and must reboot from a live CD. As pointed out, in this case, it is relatively easy to solve by adding a version number to libdrm-nouveau, the X driver and the DRI drivers. X will then have to load the correct driver and give Mesa the DRI driver name with the correct version appended. It may be a good idea to do this before the new nouveau ABI gets shipped in released distributions, and with a generic mechanisms that can be used by all X/drm drivers. Workarounds are possible, such as replacing /usr/bin/X with a script that loads the correct version, or using X over /dev/fb0 (which should work fine with any DRM KMS driver, and any non-DRI framebuffer), but they shouldn't be needed. BTW, the nVidia proprietary driver also ties the kernel and userspace version in this way, and is actually worse because it replaces the X libglx.so, breaking all other drivers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev -- _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
