On Sun, 2004-11-21 at 16:34 +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:
> well in a way it is, in a way it's not. There is a
difference between
> userspace software and kernel components here. A "broken" userspace app
> at worst breaks itself. A broken kernel component breaks the entire
> system, because kernel components have full permission to everything, by
> definition.
Yes I understand that. Bugs in drivers are *always* a big deal though.
>From a desktop users POV a bug in the kernel or a bug in the X server
drivers are basically equivalent, both kill the session dead.
Userspace/kernelspace doesn't matter in that instance.
it's not "the session is dead" but "the machine crashed, possibly
corrupting the filesystem with it". That's not quite the same...
I think you imagine everybody will blame the kernel developers for
driver
bugs. If communication is good enough there's no reason why that should be
so.
bzzzzz. wrong ;)
There's no way around this; esp since you can't see from a crash what
caused it... this is why the kernel now prints a "tainted" thing so that
the kernel developers can just ignore the bug/point the user to the bin
only module vendor
> the udev thing is 1) not caused by the kernel at all and 2)
progress.
> You don't suggest holding back progress do you ?
Here is the first line of my original email:
> Stability is about managing change, not preventing it.
I don't know whether udev was a 2.6 thing that was just not used in FC2,
but all I know is that I upgraded my system and now stuff doesn't work. If
udev was known to be a breaking change, why was it not integrated at the
*start* of the 2.6 series so vendors could say
udev isn't part of the kernel. the 2.6.0 kernel has the option to use it
already.
"OK our current driver only works with 2.4 series kernels.
You'll have to
wait a bit for a 2.6 compatible driver"
how is that different from "Ok our current driver only works with FC2.
You'll have to wait a bit for a FC3 compatible driver" that you have now
?
Esp since udev is NOT a kernel thing (although the 2.6 kernel more or
less requires udev)
> I didn't want to suggest there were no reasons to chose the
kernel side.
> It's probably a 5% performance gain or so...
Well, there you go. The 3D market is cut-throat, an avoidable performance
loss was probably deemed too high a cost.
but it's still choice.... where you claimed there wasn't any