On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 10:21 -0400, Lee Revell wrote: > On 3/14/07, Paul Davis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 08:56 -0400, Paul Coccoli wrote: > > > > > Besides, what you want is probably impossible. You can't have > > > pre-comiled, binary-only drivers *and* a custom kernel. > > > > in theory, you certainly can. but the kernel development team, and linus > > in particular, are not interested in an engineering effort/long term > > approach that makes this feasible. if you define a stable driver binary > > interface, you can change the kernel out around it and drivers keep > > working. linus has made it clear that he sees no reason to do this, and > > is perhaps even opposed to it for some possibly sound engineering > > arguments (though that is open to debate). > > Binary drivers make the kernel impossible to debug, and if the kernel > devs created such a DBI, vendors would stop releasing open source > drivers and pretty soon Linux would be no more stable than Windows. > Why should Linux sacrifice stability just so vendors can keep their > hardware interfaces secret?
I think the "engineering argument" also goes in the direction that creating a stable binary interface would preclude big changes in the way the kernel works internally once it is in place, (ie: keeping backwards compatibility with it would hinder progress). -- Fernando