Quote of the week

Quote of the week

You complain to RedHat and/or the hardware vendor, and get them to release a new kernel package which supports the right driver. Installing random drivers yourself would void your expensive RedHat support contract and your even more expensive binary application certification. RedHat support new hardware in updates, sometimes by backporting to a previous kernel.

Leaving aside the RedHat model, you seem to be saying you would like to be able to use a driver released with (say) 2.6.10 without upgrading from 2.6.4. *Even if* Linux had backward-compatible driver interfaces (and I believe Greg when he says they're a bad idea), this wouldn't work. The new driver might depend on new features which don't exist in 2.6.4. The only fix for this is a manual backport, which could be done either by a distribution or by the driver maintainer.

What you want would require not only back- but forward-compatibility: in other words, all internal kernel interfaces must be frozen for the duration of a branch. That's an entirely different development model to what the kernel uses now, and it probably wouldn't scale up.

As Greg and others have offered: if *you* want to do a stable fork of the kernel at any point and backport only the changes you think worthwhile, feel free.