Örn Hansen
I think the modularity of the kernel could be improved, as these symbols are far too easily broken. And when its too easily broken, creating drivers for commercial systems becomes a big issue,
In some parts yes, in others no. You can't really guard symbols as otherwise you'd have to cement them for all time and thus either make kernel development impossible or bloat the kernel more and more.
as a company that is selling state of the art hardware is going to wait with releasing these for us, because maintaining these drivers for every version is too expensive, and we just have to understand their point of view, not to release specs to us until "later" in this hardwares life.
Specs for nvidia chips have *never* been released, at least not since XFree86 changed to their module loader design which allowed vendors to issue binary only drivers. And just look at the size of nvdriver.o, in many systems larger then all other loaded modules together.
just hard luck for us ... so, to me, the question here would be a challenge to improve the modular aspects of the kernel, at al.
There isn't much to do, unless you're willing to accept a lot of drawbacks too. Philipp