Non-free drivers

Posted Jan 28, 2011 13:01 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Non-free drivers by trasz
Parent article: The real BKL end game

Except that 'you cannot rely on the Giant Lock in your out-of-tree network interface driver' *is* an interface change which drivers must adapt to. I'd rather signal that by an actual API change, forcing people to update their drivers or fail to compile, than silently change it and open users up to problems due to absent locking.

Non-free drivers

Posted Jan 28, 2011 13:19 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

Again - nobody is talking about not changing API and ABI _ever_. It's ok to keep it stable for a defined period of time, say, across a major version. The change you're describing happened in 2003. Since then, there were other changes - but it didn't change the fact that network drivers compiled for FreeBSD 7.0 will work fine with FreeBSD 7.4 once it's released.

Btw - of course there was a migration period, during which kernel warned about drivers that didn't declare themselves as MPSAFE ("Giant-free").