Messages in this thread | | | From | Jan Knutar <> | Subject | Re: New dev model (was [PATCH] delete devfs) | Date | Sun, 25 Jul 2004 14:59:46 +0300 |
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> That is their choice, but there's no particular need to run a kernel.org > kernel. Unless you're messing around with the kernel or have a hot > requirement for some new feature, why would running a stable kernel from > e.g. Debian not suffice? Debian is free and freely available, and it's > not the only distribution that is that way.
In the past, my experience, shared by many users, I'm sure, has been that distribution kernels generally give you worse performance (IME RH) and less stability (IME Fedora).
There's an increasing amount of hardware out there in wide-spread use, which have no drivers in either kernel.org tree or distribution trees. The fragmentation between the distributions already make it impossible to get those drivers to compile on anything but the kernel.org tree, unless the author of the driver is wealthy and has the resources and floorspace to have a few different machines with different distributions installed, and the time and resources for creating workarounds and Makefile trickery for each and every one. I don't mean binary drivers here, as they are usually backed by some corporation and target the usual distributions...
Thus, we have a whole generation of users out there who grew up with the idea that the distribution kernel is just some bloated, bug-ridden and mostly incompatible monstrosity that is only barely good for bootstrapping kernel.org kernel before starting to try compile the drivers for their hardware.
Trying to change this idea is of course difficult, as everyone is afraid of change. "Will the drivers break next release?", "Will I have to stay with an old and exploitable kernel sometime in the future when the drivers no longer compile on anything but kernel.org X.Y.Z, when distro is X.Y.(Z-3)-secfix42, and kernel.org is up to X.Y.Z+5?"
It might very well be that pushing out a large portion of the dev burden to the periphery will be good in the long term for the development of the kernel, but in short-term, I only see the fragmentation problem getting worse. I hope I can be brutally proven absolutely wrong, though. :-) - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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