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Quote of the weekQuote of the weekPosted Dec 16, 2004 15:17 UTC (Thu) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266)In reply to: Quote of the week by khim Parent article: Quote of the week
People want new drivers because drivers are conceptually different than the kernel. Look at the windows world: there are drivers for windows 2000 and XP (some drivers work for NT, 2k, and XP). I can install the driver on a windows 2000 box and it works; I can update the driver and it works. I don't need to install Windows XP. Windows 2000 is tested and works fine, so I can keep it.
The situation is a little different with linux, since you can upgrade JUST the kernel. But wait: you also need to upgrade some tools, and sometimes the C library. I ask you: why would you want to upgrade your kernel if it works just fine? If it's not broken, don't fix it. Just look at X.org: they are actually working to separate the driver releases from the core releases just so that people can get updated drivers more often than they update X.org. This would have saved me a lot of headaches in the early XFree86 4.x days, since every version of 4.0.x had slightly different drivers and features, and there were lots of regressions. I could have used an older driver with a newer core, or a newer driver with an older core. With the kernel, you can't do that.
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