Re: Driver model.. expel legacy drivers?

[Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

Ar Sad, 2006-10-14 am 17:44 -0400, ysgrifennodd John Richard Moser:
> Yeah, a static code coverage analyzer or some sort of code-reducer would
> be nice; these are in general pipe dreams but eh.  Also these are
> compressed bzip2 tarball sizes, not compiled kernel sizes or source tree
> sizes.  I would imagine a 100MB bzip2 would turn into something quite
> large; the major issue is the amount of work it takes to maintain
> something like that.

It's not actually clear that you can sensibly evaluate trends like that
or the maintainability. Take a look at the flamewar the day the kernel
tarball stopped fitting on one floppy disk (1.44MB)

Things ceasing to be maintained and exiting the kernel is a two step
process and there is a lot in the "waiting for someone to rescue it"
stage that probably has no remaining users. At some point nor far away
there is going to be a big flush of drivers when ISA bus is dropped.

Microsoft are also being very helpful. They are making it harder and
harder for people to use drivers not microsoft-signed which in turns
pushes up costs for development and as a result encourages more
standardization of driver interfaces to take place.

Alan

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