On Fri, 7 Jan 2000, Alexander Viro wrote:
> Folks, there are changes underway in block device interface and
> some of them made it into 2.3.38.
[SNIP...]
Good grief Charley Brown! You, in a few key-strokes, just blew away
major portions of the work done over the past few years by software
engineers who ported their drivers to Linux. Linux will never be
accepted as a 'professional' operating system if this continues.
It's enough of a problem putting one's job on-the-line convincing
management to risk new product development to Linux. Once these
products are in Production, and bugs are discovered in the OS,
we must be able to get the latest version of the OS and have our
drivers compile. If this is not possible, you do not have an
operating system that is anything other than an interesting
experiment.
For instance, there was a simple new change in the type of
an object passed to poll and friends. This just cost me two
weeks of unpaid work! Unpaid because I had to hide it. If
anyone in Production Engineering had learned about this, the
stuff would have been thrown out, the MicroCreeps would have
settled in with "I told you so..", and at least three of us
would have lost our jobs.
Industry is at war. You can't do this stuff to the only weapons
we have. Once you claim to have a "Professional Operating System",
its development must be handled in a professional way. If major
kernel interface components continue to change, Linux is in
a heap of trouble as are most all of those who are trying to
incorporate it into new designs.
The industrial use of Linux is not at the desktop. It involves
writing drivers for obscure things like machine controllers
(read telescope controllers), Digital signal processors (read
medical imaging processors), and other stuff you can't buy at the
computer store. It doesn't matter if you fix all of Donald Becker's
drivers to interface with the new kernel internals. You have still
broken most everything that counts.
Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.3.36 on an i686 machine (400.59 BogoMips).
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