On Sun, Jul 06, 2003 at 12:06:01AM +0300, Mark Veltzer wrote: > 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).
This is a good time to mention lwn's driver porting series, http://lwn.net/Articles/driver-porting/ > 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. Hear hear. > 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. Again, hear hear. > 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 ?!? If you want to take advantage of some of the new features, yes, you need a new glibc and maybe some new user space utilities. Things would still work flawlessly (just not optimally) with an old glibc. I run the latest 2.5 kernels (2.5.74, currently) on an otherwise untouched debian unstable system. -- Muli Ben-Yehuda http://www.mulix.org http://www.livejournal.com/~mulix/
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