On Jan 23, 2008 11:08 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de> wrote:
In the end, the development time for a driver developer for Linux is less than that of other operating systems as the maintaince is done for them for all future versions, and the ammount of code they have to write in the first place is smaller.
API tweaking might be done for you automatically, but certainly _not_ maintenance or testing. Or don't tell me you have every piece of hardware supported by Linux available and that you actually do test if you broke them :) So most certainly maintenance is not done. And actually, most of the testing effort done against the original driver was just rendered useless with the API tweak.
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.
As I told you before, this is a nice idea but 'in real life' it's load of bollocks :). If we don't make it possible for users to install 'out-of-tree' drivers (and just drivers, nothing else) they are forced to do major kernel update after each new gadget bought. And that, in real life terms, means totally new OS to install. Plug and play, you say?
No, not at all. You should be able to drop in a new kernel just fine, with only minor package updates at times.
Joe Random Hacker can, regular user can't. That, and I don't think SUSE would be too happy supporting 2.6.23.14 for SLED10 either. Andreas, would you be happy with it :) ?
As proof that this works, I was just talking with a very large company that relies on Linux last week. They use RHEL 3 on almost all of their systems. But as RHEL 3 is 2.4 based, and doesn't support a lot of new hardware, and has lots of other issues, they just drop in the latest 2.6 kernel on their own, and their developers never even notice the difference, except that their machines work better.
So, in the "real life" it isn't a load of bollocks, sorry :)
OK, try asking your auntie to do the same thing ;) Yeah, it's a piece of software. Given enough time and money anything can be done for it. But whether or not it's feasible is another thing.
IMHO the whole concept of providing complete kernel in one huge blob is flawed. Optimal case would be to break it into pieces with no dependencies.
I'd be interested in seeing your patches to attempt such a thing.
With current design this would probably be impossible :/ -- // Janne -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org