> It's in integrating the fickle whims of myriad hardware devices with amazingly high expectations of reliability and performance consistency under diverse work

> It's in integrating the fickle whims of myriad hardware devices with amazingly high expectations of reliability and performance consistency under diverse workloads. So much this; Linux Plumbers conference years ago was bitching about how every gorram vendor wanted to be a special snowflake, so even though the architecture was ARM, you basically had to port the kernel all over again to every new phone. I haven't kept up with it, but I can't imagine it's gotten better. The problems they're listing as reasons to move to a new kernel aren't caused by Linux and they won't go away until you slap the vendors and slap them hard for the bullshit they pull, both on developers and users. As for kernel ABI, this has been rehashed to death: just release your fucking driver as open source code, and it will be integrated and updated in mainline forever: http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/free_drivers.html http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/free_drivers.html