On 12/14/2010 10:53 PM, Thomas B. Ruecker wrote:
I don't see the difference between a vendor maintaining a kernel package
and a community of people maintaining a kernel package....
Being involved in a relatively small OSS community around Archos portable
media players I can tell you that it makes a huge difference for us.
But I'm not even sure why I'm jumping into this discussion. Most of our
projects are doomed to stick to whatever kernel was adapted for the given
hardware.
first I'll say I am quite appreciative of people doing such things; I
know it's not easy for a small group of people, esp if they are not
hardcore kernel developers, to do creative things on devices that
weren't really intended to do these things.
On the flip side, for an OS like MeeGo, we can't just support
arbitrarily old kernel versions as part of compliance etc etc.
Lets put it to some extreme, lets say we had to support something really
old, a 2.6.28 kernel (just picking that version because my N900 phone
runs that... it was a not too old kernel when the phone first shipped
but the n900 is out quite some time now).
If we had to support such an old kernel as part of compliance, we
wouldn't be able to use any new features that got added to Linux after
that... things like good CGROUP support, the power management
statistics that allow us to do active power management, the perf
tracepoints for performance monitoring/system events, various V4L
extensions for cameras etc etc etc... the list is quite long actually.
For example, it wouldn't give us an option to adopt systemd for startup
(if/when we decide to do that, but it wouldn't even be an option if we
had to work on such an old kernel), or to go to a newer udev (which
connman and X often need)
Now at least Nokia for the N900 provides a much newer kernel for MeeGo,
so those of us who own N900's are in good shape, but the conflict I'm
trying to point out is real... and there will be a point where, even if
you ignore the hard compliance topic of what applications can expect,
the core OS just expects newer kernel functionality.
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