>I have a collection of drivers and things that deal with bizarre and
>proprietary hardware of some sort or another, and neither I nor the people
>who pay me to write them particularly relish the thought of having to have
>them altered to work with new kernels on a regular basis. If they relied
>on some particular deep magic to do with the implementation details of the
>bowels of the kernel, then I'd be prepared to see them break, but not if
>they stick to what I consider to be clean and legal interfaces. Your
>assertion that the PnP patches 'do not affect anything other than the
>kernel source' is simply false, unless you expand your definition of 'the
>kernel source' to mean 'the kernel source, and everything that works with
>it'.
We are talking about _development_ kernels here. The API is
GUARANTEED to changed during the development phase. Linus
just made a rather spectacular API change in the kernel with
the new exception stuff. You should not need to change your
drivers if you stick with 2.0 (the _stable_ kernel series).
>IMHO, any symbol that gets exported to modules should be viewed as
>'external', and not changed without a very good reason. This applies
>especially to global things like kmalloc and the request_*() functions.
They won't be changed in 2.0 for sure. However, we are just
getting into the 2.1 series and this is the perfect time
for the change. Out with the old, in with the new. Linux has
needed PnP support for some time now. It is a "very good reason"
to change the API.
Go Andrew!
Rob
(rriggs@tesser.com)