Oh the irony

Posted Jan 17, 2007 14:20 UTC (Wed) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

This is really just another request for a frozen binary interface in disguise. I think Linux has demonstrated that eschewing a binary interface can work very well, and does work very well for Linux. Trying to lock down the driver interface goes against Linux development practices, which are working fine.

Further, it is _desirable_ that if you are going to have "duplicate" free unix kernel projects that it be possible for their interfaces to diverge, so that different approaches may be explored and ultimately the systems may improve.

In short, I think the benefits for "shared drivers" would be much lower than the benefits for "duplicate drivers", and they might be lower with more manpower in terms of dealing with the unavoidable eventual in-kernel design cruft resulting from frozen interfaces. Solaris certainly has been, in the past, much less willing to change programming interfaces than Linux has been, so maybe Solaris alone will feel more comfortable to you. Personally, I'm hoping that OpenSolaris's openness encourages them to be willing to dump clearly awful solutions (how long was STREAMS the default?) and deploy improvements.