Driver API anyone? [LWN.net]

Driver API anyone?

Posted Jun 22, 2007 7:19 UTC (Fri) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183)
In reply to: Driver API anyone? by arjan
Parent article: Long-term support and backport risk

Something like that could work (at least, I imagine it could :) ) if the API/ABI numbers applied to subsystems (e.g. the wireless extensions) and not to single functions. You would need at least two version numbers - the current one and the last one with which the current is backwards compatible. It would probably be more of an "ease the transistion pain" measure though, as I can't see the kernel developers being happy to keep maintaining older APIs once they started needing too much code of their own.

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Driver API anyone?

Posted Jun 22, 2007 14:28 UTC (Fri) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link]

In practice, we only maintained one older version for anything
in development, but froze anything we gave to end-user customers.
Since this is a **kernel** api we're talking about, I wouldn't
keep more tan one "old" version.

The Multicians never seemed to get more than one old version,
but that assumed a very active support process to keep all
the customer machines sufficiently current.

--dave