Quote of the week [LWN.net]

Quote of the week

Posted Oct 12, 2006 16:41 UTC (Thu) by william.waddington (subscriber, #25316)
In reply to: Quote of the week by dougg
Parent article: Quote of the week

We have included source with our drivers going back to SunOS 4.1.3 - about the time Linus was coding in his jammies. To the extent possible, we try to protect our users/OEMs from kernel changes, and give them a consistent API. Part of this is a (reasonable) expectation that they can download our latest 2.6 driver (for example) and expect it to play nice with the latest 2.6 kernel as well as earlier kernels in the 2.6 series.

The niche is small, and the drivers of interest only to us and a small group of users and OEMs. The chance of main line inclusion is zero (or maybe a large negative number) due to niche size, and probably coding style...

I wouldn't expect kernel developers to constrain changes for the sake of out-of-tree maintainers, but where simple #define(s) in the kernel tree can help us maintain source-level compatibility (our drivers are intended to be compiled by the user/OEM at initial install) it would be quite helpful.

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Quote of the week

Posted Oct 12, 2006 19:11 UTC (Thu) by net_bh (guest, #28735) [Link]

>The niche is small, and the drivers of interest only to us and a small group >of users and OEMs. The chance of main line inclusion is zero (or maybe a >large negative number) due to niche size, and probably coding style...

For this reason alone, please read Greg-KH's OLS keynote @ http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/ols_2006_keynote.html
Somewhere in the middle he talks about exactly your case and why it is still beneficial to push your code in-tree.

Quote of the week

Posted Oct 13, 2006 14:13 UTC (Fri) by william.waddington (subscriber, #25316) [Link]

"For this reason alone, please read Greg-KH's OLS keynote @ http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/ols_2006_keynote.html
Somewhere in the middle he talks about exactly your case and why it is still "beneficial to push your code in-tree."

You mean that pushing my code in tree would improve my coding style? No doubt :) Seriously, I'm familiar with Mr. KH's presentation, and I don't really disagree, at least for new driver development.

Even so, there are things about the code that would make pushing in-line a real ordeal: coding style, plethora of ioctls, and DMA directly to/from user buffers, among others. The coding style is fixable, and there are probably "better" ways to handle the API, but "fixing" the API would require abandoning the read/write/ioctl interface we have kept consistent for multiple unixen for 15 years - which seems to be working well for our OEMs and end users.