API/ABI stability

Posted Sep 2, 2004 13:46 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227)
Parent article: Pointless ideology?

ABI/API breakage hurts *all* users, even ones with hardware supported by Free drivers. Any new hardware driver is only going to be in a newer kernel. Users running a distribution even a couple months old may find that there is some new hardware they wish to use, the driver can't be used with their kernel due to API breakage, and they are forced to upgrade their kernel. Which means they have to take any other new behaviours, breakages, user-space tool modifications, and so on just to get some new periphial working. With ABI breakage, users are always forced to recompile drivers. If you upgrade a kernel, you have to remember to recompile and reinstall all drivers, possibly regenerate your initrd images, etc. *IF* there was a standard kernel source installation mechanism that found out-of-tree drivers and rebuilt them and regenerated the initrd, such that any kernel driver would be handled by any distro kernel packages or kernel rebuilds, this wouldn't be a problem.