Re: A newbie's view

["Krzysztof G. Baranowski" <kgb@manjak.knm.org.pl>]

On Thu, 28 Jan 1999, Rich Derr wrote:
>    Exactly what the distro maintainers try to do when they make their
> generic kernels.  The modularization efforts in the 1.3 time were
> largely to support this.  Now it would have been even better if kernel
> version independant modules were possible, but still, this is minor.
Version independend modules aren't so easy to implement in Linux
IMO.[1] They would require stable, binary backwards compactible API
for modules. Implementing such kind of API would require adding
another layer to the kernel, which would talk between your driver
and kernel internals... and this would be just pure bloat which
would cost you extra complexity and give you almost nothing. I've
recently read a litte documentation of WinDDK and this is what NT
does. Believe me this way lies madness  :-)

[ side note: the most funny thing in WinDDK are comments in their
             example code, but I won't post the examples here,
             as this could be considered off-topic :) ]

Kris

[1] Note that CONFIG_MODVERSIONS buys you almost nothing. It works OK
    when symbol doesn't change, but when it changes you have to recompile 
    your module anyway.


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