On Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 02:46:24PM -0600, Mike McCarty wrote: > In any case, a unified approach to driver interface is certainly > possible, and does not stifle kernel development. We had a RHEL bug once in ext3. It was fixed upstream in a half dozen lines of code. We couldn't take that fix into RHEL3 because of kernel ABI concerns. Stephen Tweedie and several others spent about two weeks jumping through hoops to come up with a fix with similar effect whilst maintaining ABI, which ended up being more invasive than the upstream variant. The time of those developers could have been put to far more useful things had it not been for the chains of ABI compatability. And this is just one bug, and the above is far from a rare case. Doesn't stifle development? Do me a favour.. Dave -- http://www.codemonkey.org.uk
