Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

Lars Marowsky-Bree
2005-12-06T13:26:20Z

On 2005-12-05T14:30:09, Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com> wrote:

> Actually I would be happy with the stability of this series if people
> would stop trying to take working features OUT of it!

Features are removed when they are no longer features, but design
irritations in a new and improved design, and usually, equivalent or
better (or at least thought to be) functionality is available still in
the big picture (which includes user-space), hopefully in a cleaner
place.

Now, design is often a holy war, and people disagree. That's fine and to
be expected. And sometimes, the whole solution takes a while to
materialize and be implemented from the kernel up to all user-space and
even longer until it has been implemented in the brains of the admins.
This, too, is fine and expected. It's called "innovation" and
"development", sometimes iterative.

> working all that well in any case. But if existing features suddenly
> drop out from beneath the user, then you will find people doing what you
> mentioned, staying with old kernels with holes rather than moving to
> kernels which are simply no longer functional.

You're assuming the kernel is both "static" design-wise as well as
independent (or at least basically eternally backwards compatible) from
user-space. Both assumptions are no longer true. Get over it.

Sincerely,
Lars Marowsky-Brée

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High Availability & Clustering
SUSE Labs, Research and Development
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