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It's sort of silly to imply that only RedHat users care or that only RedHat users should benefit. All users need and benefit from stability.

JoshTriplett 12y ago
Only people running long-term-stable distributions care, and those distributions provide the level of ABI stability their users want. I'm simply saying that it makes more sense for downstream distributions to handle rather than the upstream Linux kernel. On the flip side, users running up-to-the-minute distributions don't necessarily care, and in fact care more about some of the properties that a stable upstream kernel ABI would trade away. More importantly, if a stable ABI does not exist upstream, a downstream distro can add it. But if a stable ABI exists upstream, a downstream distro can't get the traded-away benefits back.
- binarycrusader 12y ago
  So only some distributions get a stable ABI but not others, leaving users of distributions with less support with a less usable system. I sincerely question the supposed benefits of this tradeoff. I have yet to see any articulated beyond hypothetical improvements in ease of implementation and zero benefit to the average user.
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    Distributions whose users want an unchanging ABI get one. Distributions whose users don't care (e.g. those where either the users don't care about proprietary/out-of-tree drivers or the users use the packaged versions of those drivers in the distribution that get rebuilt when the kernel changes) don't bother. Your arguments assume that everyone obviously wants an unchanging driver ABI. I'd love to see statistics for how many users actually build and run out-of-tree drivers themselves, but I'd bet on it being a small fraction, most of which is the nVidia or ATI proprietary graphics drivers. And again, personally, I don't consider it a feature to cater to proprietary driver vendors. Beyond that, I've seen several reports regarding some of what binary driver vendors do that goes well beyond the exported driver interface (e.g. searching for core kernel data structures in memory and grubbing around in them), so it's not necessarily obvious that an unchanging driver ABI would actually stop binary drivers from breaking. In any case, I'm not interested in arguing further about the development practices I've already mentioned and pointed to that depend on the ability to evolve an interface along with all of its users.

JoshTriplett 12y ago

Only people running long-term-stable distributions care, and those distributions provide the level of ABI stability their users want. I'm simply saying that it makes more sense for downstream distributions to handle rather than the upstream Linux kernel. On the flip side, users running up-to-the-minute distributions don't necessarily care, and in fact care more about some of the properties that a stable upstream kernel ABI would trade away. More importantly, if a stable ABI does not exist upstream, a downstream distro can add it. But if a stable ABI exists upstream, a downstream distro can't get the traded-away benefits back.

binarycrusader 12y ago
So only some distributions get a stable ABI but not others, leaving users of distributions with less support with a less usable system. I sincerely question the supposed benefits of this tradeoff. I have yet to see any articulated beyond hypothetical improvements in ease of implementation and zero benefit to the average user.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  Distributions whose users want an unchanging ABI get one. Distributions whose users don't care (e.g. those where either the users don't care about proprietary/out-of-tree drivers or the users use the packaged versions of those drivers in the distribution that get rebuilt when the kernel changes) don't bother. Your arguments assume that everyone obviously wants an unchanging driver ABI. I'd love to see statistics for how many users actually build and run out-of-tree drivers themselves, but I'd bet on it being a small fraction, most of which is the nVidia or ATI proprietary graphics drivers. And again, personally, I don't consider it a feature to cater to proprietary driver vendors. Beyond that, I've seen several reports regarding some of what binary driver vendors do that goes well beyond the exported driver interface (e.g. searching for core kernel data structures in memory and grubbing around in them), so it's not necessarily obvious that an unchanging driver ABI would actually stop binary drivers from breaking. In any case, I'm not interested in arguing further about the development practices I've already mentioned and pointed to that depend on the ability to evolve an interface along with all of its users.