Re: 2.6.16-rc4: known regressions

From: Martin Bligh
Date: Wed Feb 22 2006 - 12:13:10 EST


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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