Closed source modules will be banned from kernel?

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Tue Jul 8 15:14:36 UTC 2008


Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> John Burton wrote:
>> Hmmm... do "Open Source" modules have the same problem?  Do these 
>> "wholesale gratuitous changes" occur during minor revision changes or 
>> major version changes? Major version changes in most software change 
>> the API, while minor revisions do not. Are the kernel modules not 
>> consistent with this?
> 
> The kernel has a stable user space API and volatile in-kernel modules 
> interfaces API. The reasons are outlined in
> 
> http://lxr.linux.no/linux/Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt
> 
> For free and open source code (including but not limited to driver 
> modules) that is included within the upstream kernel, this presents no 
> problems since whenever API changes occur, whoever is making the API 
> change can go ahead and fix all the consumers of the API.
> 
> Linux kernel doesn't follow the traditional stable vs unstable tree 
> development model in recent 2.6 kernel releases. Discussions on the 
> reason for the change are outlined in many places including
> 
> http://lwn.net/Articles/94386/

Do you also happen to have a link for Red Hat's position on this problem 
or a description of how they deal with it in an enterprise product?

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com




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