From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: [Dri-devel] Re: DRM and pci_driver conversion Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 13:32:15 -0800 (PST) Sender: linux-fbdev-devel-admin@lists.sourceforge.net Message-ID: References: <3F9D741C.9010501@us.ibm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Return-path: In-Reply-To: <3F9D741C.9010501@us.ibm.com> Errors-To: linux-fbdev-devel-admin@lists.sourceforge.net List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: Ian Romanick Cc: David Dawes , dri-devel , fb-devel On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Ian Romanick wrote: > > I'm also baffled by the general animosty shown towards Linux. I don't think it is animosity vs Linux per se, but I do think that XFree86 tends to have a very strong bias against infrastructure change. Which is somewhat understandable: I'm a kernel person, so infrastructure change is what I'm all about, but most other projects really hate having any kind of rug pulled out from under them. And kernel modules are _nasty_. From past experience, I can just say that external kernel modules (ones not integrated into the standard kernel tree) just generate a lot of pain on all sides. Users, project developers, and kernel developers universally _hate_ having to try to keep external modules working and debugging the problems that inevitably happen when they don't work. So animosity toward them is certainly understandable - they just don't work very well, and are a total maintenance nightmare. This is the reason why I decided I had to follow the DRI CVS tree: just to try to make the DRI kernel modules basically irrelevant to most people. My theory is that peopel are more likely to happily upgrade the whole kernel than to try to fight the version skew that inevitable happens with external kernel modules. This is, btw, also the reason why I have been an asshole about backwards compatibility wrt the DRI project, and was less-than-perfectly-polite to some people when DRI upgrades caused older setups to fail. That's simply because my belief is that version skew is simply unacceptable, which means that the only _acceptable_ situation is to try to make it ok to always have the most recent kernel. So otherwise we'd have to go back to the "use external modules" thing, which I just don't believe works. This is also the reason I believe that the only really workable way to handle this is to have a very version-neutral (and thus _stupid_) minimal driver for handling the low-level needs of all the projects involved (DRI/XFree86/fbcon). Exactly to avoid the possibility of version skew. In other words, I'd keep it so simple that versions don't really matter, because the low-level driver doesn't do enough complex things that you'd be forced to upgrade it all the time. I don't think fbdev is at all the proper interface - I think the proper interface is something that is so close to the hardware that the hardware _forces_ all issues, and there are never any questions of what the low-level driver should be. And since people still want to run X on old setups too, clearly X will have to have the ability to have its own user-space module. That's needed for other operating systems _anyway_, so this wouldn't obviate that. Linus ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: The SF.net Donation Program. Do you like what SourceForge.net is doing for the Open Source Community? Make a contribution, and help us add new features and functionality. Click here: http://sourceforge.net/donate/