Re: 2.6.16-rc4: known regressions

[Martin Bligh <mbligh@mbligh.org>]

David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-02-22 at 07:44 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 22 Feb 2006, Kay Sievers wrote:
> >
> > > Well, that's part of the contract by using an experimental version of HAL,
> > > it has nothing to do with the kernel
> >
> > NO NO NO!
> >
> > Dammit, if this is the logic and mode of operation of HAL people, then we 
> > must stop accepting patches to the kernel from HAL people.
> >
> > THIS IS NOT DEBATABLE.
> >
> > If you cannot maintain a stable kernel interface, then you damn well 
> > should not send your patches in for inclusion in the standard kernel. Keep 
> > your own "HAL-unstable" kernel and ask people to test it there.
>
>
> Oh, you know, I don't think that's exactly how it works; HAL is pretty
> much at the mercy of what changes goes into the kernel. And, trust me,
> the changes we need to cope with from your so-called stable API are not
> so nice. 
>
> But I realize these changes are important because it's progress and back
> in 2.6.0 things were horribly broken for at least desktop workloads [1].
> It also makes me release note that newer HAL releases require newer
> kernel and udev releases and that's alright. In fact it's perfectly
> fine. We get users to upgrade to the latest and greatest and we keep
> making good progress. That's open source at it's finest I think.

If it's all that fragile, surely it just means that someone picked the
wrong point at which to try to form the API abstraction?

Frankly, that seems to be the issue behind a lot of these problems -
people decide to shove stuff into userspace for some religions reason, 
without thinking about the API implications at all.

We don't have a sane way to package all the userspace crud together
with the microkernel that people are turning Linux into. Either people
quit pretending that divesting things to userspace is a solution to all
hard problems, or we create a packaging / bundling mechanism for all
this shite. Frankly, I prefer the former, but whichever ... it's
getting insane.

M.
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