Versioned APIs in the kernel? [LWN.net]

Versioned APIs in the kernel?

Posted Sep 6, 2007 6:43 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183)
In reply to: Versioned APIs in the kernel? by khim
Parent article: LCE: Linux, hardware vendors, and enterprise distributors

But would that work less well than what Redhat is doing now? Massively backporting new stuff to old kernels, breaking many things in the process and trying to fix them. In this case, the people who produce the closed source drivers which they want to keep compatible can do a quick test with new kernel versions and report back to Redhat or SUSE saying what needs to be fixed. It actually makes their life easier, as they only have to test against one tree, not every enterprise kernel. And once all regressions which interest the enterprise distributor have been fixed in a given kernel version, or they have created compatiblilty APIs to solve them (and they are only interested in binary modules which have been certified against their distribution) they can add that kernel, which by now has probably had several micro-releases, to their distribution.

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Versioned APIs in the kernel?

Posted Sep 6, 2007 8:14 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

It actually makes their life easier, as they only have to test against one tree, not every enterprise kernel.

Only the guys who produce binary drivers benefit: RedHat guys will still need to backport features, mainstream developers will be forced to keep "compatibility layer" unbroken, etc.

P.S. Do you really think RedHat keeps kernels bug-for-bug compatible in the life of enterprise distribution ? Then you are mistaken: it's not uncommon to require new version of binary drivers after kernel upgrade for RHEL. They only keep old version and backport features because all other components are handled in this way too...