On Saturday 05 July 2003 23:37, you wrote:
> בשבת, 5 ביולי 2003, 17:04, Muli Ben-Yehuda כתב:
> Muli, you are talking from a kernel programmer point of view. I am talking
> about a user point of view.
> So what? I have to stay behind because I use a "non standard h/w"? Or
> should I "upgrade" my h/w? That sux ass. Yes today is more likely to find
> support for our exotic h/w, but still not all h/w is supported.
>
Diego!
You seem to be confused about a lot of things here.
Here are a few points:
1. In Linux all standard drivers are part of the kernel. This means that you
will get all the drivers you need just as before. Unless you compiled your
own drivers (meaning drivers that you either wrote or got source for from a
third party which is not the kernel development team) then you should be
fine. Even third party drivers may have versions for 2.6 once it comes out.
In any case it should be quite easy to port drivers from 2.4 to 2.6 unless
the drivers are very complex and large (for instance - porting a small
communcation device may be very easy but porting an entire file system may be
hard).
2. The reason that driver API is broken is to *** IMPROVE *** the interaction
between the kernel and the drivers and make the API more fine grained so that
better use of the hardware would be possible and enable more fine grained
control of the hardware and better flow of data to and from the user level
applications and the hardware component. This situation is *** much better
*** than in the closed source world where the API between the kernel and the
drivers is rarely broken since the drivers are binary only drivers which are
written by the HW maker. The turn around time between changin driver API in
windows and getting to the full set of drivers you need is a couple of years
at best while in Linux it could be a couple of months. That is part of the
reason why linux is moving at such a rapid pace forward and windows has such
a hard time with stability.
3. The availability of the source code for all drivers is a big part of why
linux is more stable - this is because people can try and find innovative
ways to search for common driver oriented bugs (like the stanford checker for
instance). Since most of the code in the OS is drivers (this is true for
Linux and Windows) then most of the bugs that you encounter are actually
driver oriented bugs and not core system bugs. Software quality in the driver
code is what ultimately determines the stability of an operating system and
open source does it better.
4. As Muli said - user space should be no problem although I'm pretty sure you
will need a new version of glibc if you want to use new syscalls and
features. Muli ?!?
Cheers,
Mark
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