Staging drivers out

Posted Nov 2, 2009 16:22 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Staging drivers out by bronson
Parent article: Staging drivers out

So... you consider breaking a network driver and breaking headless machines completely, possibly requiring long cross-country treks to fix it, a *good* thing?!

Upgrading the kernel frankly scares me now. Every single kernel from 2.6.28.x upwards has hit me with at least one severe regression on my home machines alone (defined as 'prevents booting or disrupts normal functioning on an at least daily basis'), and there are only four of them and a few VMs! When I upgrade I now schedule a whole weekend to try to work around the inevitable blasted breakages... even upgrading glibc is less nervewracking.

Staging drivers out

Posted Nov 2, 2009 18:06 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

Jeez, are you deliberately trying to be difficult? When did I ever say that?

We're talking about staging drivers out here. In other words, BREAKING THE DRIVER. We just need to figure out how to do it with the least amount of distress to end users.

I claim that breaking the driver softly, then removing it a year later, is better than just yanking it out without warning. And that the current technique of emitting log messages and adding entries to text files that nobody reads are more or less equivalent to doing it without warning.

Does that make sense?

Staging drivers out

Posted Nov 3, 2009 19:42 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Ah. Er, yes, true. I lost the context somewhere, despite it being in the
subject line. :)

And yes, it *is* better to break it softly and only kill it hard later on.