2 ms·

can such drivers be moved out of kernel? what exactly stops that? why do they even need to be in kernel repo and not brought at/after install time?

• gslepak 6mo ago
  > why do they even need to be in kernel People have been asking this question since Linux was first invented…
  • s20n 6mo ago
    I could never in a million years have imagined that LLM-slop driven fuzzing would become the ultimate vindication for the microkernel philosophy
• drewg123 6mo ago
  Linux is actively hostile to out-of-tree drivers. There is no stable driver API, and interfaces change at the drop of a hat. Maintaining an out of tree driver is a constant nightmare where you're always dealing with interfaces changing out from under you. I wrote and maintained 10GbE drivers for a small company in the 2000s, and just the SHIM file for our driver on Linux to massage over API differences was well over 1000 lines. I think it was close to the same size as the entire driver for one of the BSDs.
  • terryot 6mo ago
    A counterpoint: I recently asked Claude to port an obsolete ~2010 driver to latest kernel by asking Claude to "make it work". Few builds later and few crashes later, I had a working driver, with DMA, modern Io map protection, etc. It's not a nightmare anymore to port drivers
  • achierius 6mo ago
    GP meant moving the driver into userspace, which is much less painful due to the stable userspace APIs.
    • ahepp 6mo ago
      I’m not sure the GP did mean that, but I agree it’s a much better solution than maintaining an out-of-tree kernel module, which is generally a really bad idea