On Sun, 14 Aug 2011, Alexander Best wrote:
It might be worth mentioning this in UPDATING or similar, since a kernel
built with clang (I haven't tried gcc) during this window will make it
impossible to do a buildworld without first rebuilding the kernel with this
fix. It also seems to break at least portsnap, and possibly other tools as
well.
+1. please also mention the KPI change to fget()! so many people have had
issues, where 3rd party drivers - mostly the nvidia binary driver - got
broken.
The nVidia driver is rare in that it uses the file descriptor interfaces from
inside a third-party driver. Most third-party drivers plug into much more
limited subsets of the kernel -- newbus, busdma, the ifnet interface, the disk
interface, CAM, USB, etc. The reason to merge this change now was to ensure
that 9.0 shipped with the interface in its final form rather than have to try
to work around the existing modules for 9.1. However, I would comment more
generally that device drivers that use interfaces outside of the kernel device
driver KPIs are inherently fragile.
(Not sure there's anything to be done about that in the nVidia case).
(Per previous e-mail, I have queued a request to re@ to update UPDATING).
Robert
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