Re: kbuild 2.5 is ready for inclusion in the 2.5 kernel

Alan Cox
2002-05-02T18:14:29Z

> And then think about the fact that they are able to even *patch*
> running kernels. There is no way I can be convinced that the whole
> versioning stuff is neccessary or a good design for any purpose.

I wouldnt pick Solaris as an example. A long time ago they fixed a bug
in the streams code I found that let anyone reconfigure networking. It was
fixed in a day then not released for a year. It cost Sun a lot because
several customers wisely asked why it hadn't been fixed and went with
other products. To this day Sun has never explained officially why it took
a year to fix but I've been informed off the record by sun people I trust
that it was because it broke their module abi so had to be held over for
the next release

Now I don't actually give a hoot whether you implement the module binding
via /proc/kernel.so and C++ like mangling hacks or the _R stuff we do now
but don't confuse the Linux approach of putting a few million users before
a few binary module ISV's with the Solaris one.

Alan