Possibly offtopic : Binary only driver

[Arjan van de Ven]

On Sun, 2004-11-21 at 16:34 +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:
> > well in a way it is, in a way it's not. There is a difference between
> > userspace software and kernel components here. A "broken" userspace app
> > at worst breaks itself. A broken kernel component breaks the entire
> > system, because kernel components have full permission to everything, by
> > definition. 
> 
> Yes I understand that. Bugs in drivers are *always* a big deal though.
> >From a desktop users POV a bug in the kernel or a bug in the X server
> drivers are basically equivalent, both kill the session dead.
> Userspace/kernelspace doesn't matter in that instance.

it's not "the session is dead" but "the machine crashed, possibly
corrupting the filesystem with it". That's not quite the same...


> I think you imagine everybody will blame the kernel developers for driver
> bugs. If communication is good enough there's no reason why that should be
> so.

bzzzzz. wrong ;)
There's no way around this; esp since you can't see from a crash what
caused it... this is why the kernel now prints a "tainted" thing so that
the kernel developers can just ignore the bug/point the user to the bin
only module vendor
> > the udev thing is 1) not caused by the kernel at all and 2) progress.
> > You don't suggest holding back progress do you ?
> 
> Here is the first line of my original email:
> 
> > Stability is about managing change, not preventing it.
> 
> I don't know whether udev was a 2.6 thing that was just not used in FC2,
> but all I know is that I upgraded my system and now stuff doesn't work. If
> udev was known to be a breaking change, why was it not integrated at the
> *start* of the 2.6 series so vendors could say

udev isn't part of the kernel. the 2.6.0 kernel has the option to use it
already.


> "OK our current driver only works with 2.4 series kernels. You'll have to
> wait a bit for a 2.6 compatible driver"

how is that different from "Ok our current driver only works with FC2.
You'll have to wait a bit for a FC3 compatible driver" that you have now
?
Esp since udev is NOT a kernel thing (although the 2.6 kernel more or
less requires udev)

> > I didn't want to suggest there were no reasons to chose the kernel side.
> > It's probably a 5% performance gain or so...
> 
> Well, there you go. The 3D market is cut-throat, an avoidable performance
> loss was probably deemed too high a cost.

but it's still choice.... where you claimed there wasn't any 
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