Keeping up with the Kroah-Hartmans (who upgrade without notice)
Posted Aug 4, 2006 4:33 UTC (Fri) by
xoddam (subscriber, #2322)
In reply to:
Keeping up with the Kroah-Hartmans (who upgrade without notice) by wilck
Parent article:
New kernels and old distributions
> There is a huge difference between sysfs and /dev/kmem.
> sysfs is globally visible and has a lot of reasonable uses.
/dev/kmem used to have reasonable uses too, like insmod. Now insmod is
done inside the kernel, and there are no reasonable uses left for it
besides, as you say, debugging (but it is very limited even for that
purpose).
> Perhaps the opposite is true - perhaps the 'stable API' is a
> more complex subject than Greg and his followers pretend?
My point exactly -- on the one hand the 'no stable API' party wants to be
able to change internals at will, maintaining a stable interface to
userspace only, and on the other hand the primary spokesman for this
party exposes internals to userspace in such a way that changing them
*will* break userspace.
I'm suggesting that the real boundary of the stable API is on the far
side of userspace utilities like udev and modutils which *must* know
about kernel internals.
It's nice to *claim* a firm userspace/kernel boundary line, but
maintaining that boundary will mean freezing interfaces to userspace
technologies like hotplug in concrete from the very beginning. This is
not reasonable. Hotplug is *required* for suspend; suspend was wrong;
hotplug must change.
The only alternative is to do *all* interesting hardware-related work
in-kernel. Down with daemons!
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