[haiku-development] Re: Haiku Kernel Architecture Questions

  • From: "François Revol" <revol@xxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:25:14 +0100 CET

> A problem Linux kernel modules is that they're designed to cause a
> lot
> of grief for anyone who develops or even uses closed-source drivers.

Not only.
It also impairs opensource drivers, like OpenSound, because they must
maintain a large ugly glue to the different kernel calls depending on
the version.
Most linux devs disredard anything that isn't part of the official
tree, yet they don't care about OSS anyway due to the ALSA propaganda.

> One way they do that is to optionally encode the kernel version in
> the
> prototypes for each module's entry points.  If you're running a
> kernel
> that's configured to do that, then you can't use modules that weren't
> built for the exact same kernel version. If you don't have source and
> the driver's vendor isn't willing to supply a module specific to your
> kernel version, then you're SOL.

Which is funny, cause if Microsoft did it they'd be brought to court
for lack of interoperability by those very same FOSS coders...

> My understanding is that Linus considers this a feature and not a
> bug!

Eh.

Haiku inherited a clean driver API from BeOS that was necessary there
due to the kernel being closed, so from this perspective closed source
was a plus at that time.

François.

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