On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 04:26:53PM +0000, Alexey Eremenko wrote: > Dear Greg KH,
Hi (you forgot a "-" in my name :) > I have read your documents about kernel drivers and binary compatibility. > > Well, I disagree with your position. I don't think that getting all > the drivers into the kernel is good idea at all. I'm sorry you feel this way. > This is because when > you have 2 competing drivers, that are doing nearly the same thing, > one of them will not be accepted. Do you have an example of such a thing? We have multiple drivers for the same device today in the kernel, and have had more in the past. Ideally it's not the best thing, but we do seem to work around it ok :) > Additionally, my philosophy says it is OK to have non-GPL (and > non-Freedom) drivers for Linux. Those cannot be inserted into mainline > of course. I'm sorry your philosophy happens to be contrary to what the law, and what the GPL is understood to be about. I'm not going to try to change your philosophy, just state that it is not in line with what I, and the lawyers for all of the major Linux companies have come to understand over the years (including Novell.) Also look at the public statements that IBM has made regarding the GPL and Linux kernel drivers in the past. If you disagree with IBM's lawyers, I would be very interested in hearing your legal position in detail. > Additionally, I believe it is not correct to force to developer to > maintain his driver. No one is forcing anyone to use Linux here. > Keeping up with Linux changing takes up driver developer's time. Yes. > And kernel interfaces are changing too fast. How do you measure "too fast"? What rate of change would be acceptable for you? Can you quantify that based on the need for change in the market and environment that Linux is in? Do you even know what our rate of change is? I just ran the numbers last week, and they are much larger than has ever been reported in the past... > I believe having stable kernel ABI can save many work hours of driver > developer's, because they won't need to update their drivers every > time when someone else broke something. I'm sorry you feel this way, but you haven't justified why this is so. If you get your driver into the main kernel tree, any changes to the ABI are done automatically for you. So that means that it saves the driver developer's time even more that way, as they do not need to ever update their driver again, which is not something that any other operating system can provide. This also provides a more secure, and better product for the user in the end. They never need to worry about external drivers, and everything "just works" for them automatically. > I believe development can go without breaking _already working_ > things. At least not every micro-release. Please explain, in detail, how this can happen. Also, please explain how the different points that are expressed in the file, Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt are not correct, and can somehow be handled with your proposed stable api. thanks, greg k-h -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
