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>Under the hood, Minoca contains a powerful driver model between device drivers and the kernel. The idea is that drivers can be written in a forward compatible
by qz_ 10y ago
>Under the hood, Minoca contains a powerful driver model between device drivers and the kernel. The idea is that drivers can be written in a forward compatible manner, so kernel level components can be upgraded without requiring a recompilation of all device drivers.
This sounds really smart and it looks great overall <3
- staticfish 10y agoSo true. it really is my biggest problem with the monolithic Linux kernel.
- notalaser 10y agoThere is nothing that prevents a monolithic kernel from using the same model -- no theoretical barrier to it, in any case. Linux doesn't do this because its developers don't want it to.
- drewg123 10y agoRHEL/ Centos defines a stable driver ABI, and even has tools that devs can use to check that their binary drivers don't use any symbols outside the ABI.
- cyphar 10y agoSUSE does too. As far as I'm aware, most stable distributions use a kABI checker. This is the same reason that Android doesn't have many kernel updates -- because proprietary driver authors don't feel like keeping up to date with kABI changes.
- bonzini 10y agoThat's the "port driver"+"mini port driver" model of Windows.