Re: kerenls: hand-rolled v. stock
On 2004-06-24, John Summerfield penned:
>>
>
> Well, I suspect the Kernel Gods prune bits out of the kernel because
> they offend their sensibilities (DFSG). I've not actually confirmed
> this, but I got that impression from something I read, and it's
> believable.
You seem to be talking about compiling from upstream source vs. using a
debianized kernel, whether source or precompiled.
Er, are you talking about not providing bits in the prepackaged kernels,
or are you talking about dinking bits out of the source? I have no
experience with the prepackaged kernels, other than on fresh install.
I actually roll my own from debian sources. They apply patches and
whatnot for me, which is handy.
As of a month or two ago, there have been discussions of removing bits
from the kernel. To the best of my understanding, there are two issues.
One is the DFSG; the other is whether debian has the right to distribute
the materials in question.
Some users might consider this purely an inconvenience; I, on the other
hand, sympathize with some of the concerns. I strongly believe that, if
you're going to have a policy statement, your product should agree with
the policy; if it doesn't, either the policy or the product needs to be
fixed.
I don't think you can criticize a distro for not including every
possible option in their prepackaged kernels; what a mess! Every distro
has to make a decision about what stuff will be most useful to their
users.
> Consider some card that has loadable firmware.An Alacatel Speedtouch
> USB ADSL modem is one such device, the prism54-based wireless cards
> too. Oh, IBM also has OCO (object-code-only) drivers.
>
> Possibly some drivers might make their way into the kernel, and I
> think some have. You can be pretty sure that the Debian Kernel people
> will remove them.
You can be pretty sure that the issue has been hotly discussed over on
debian-dev. I couldn't keep up with all the emails, so I can't tell you
whether or how that's been resolved.
One of Debian's core values is to allow people to run a completely free
as in libre system. There are plenty of ways you can circumvent this; I
downloaded sources from kernel.org for years before I decided to use the
debian kernel source packages, mostly because they were familiar.
Nothing forces you to use the debian prepackaged kernels. But I like
the fact that I can choose to have a completely libre system easily
through debian.
> Also, some vendors (and I don't know whether Debian is one) do/did not
> build the NTFS driver (unstable, prone to damaging date) or HPFS
> (dunno why, but since I no longer have any OS/2 disks I care about
> I've not bothered about it). If you want those, you get to build it
> yourself.
I can't really say ... the first thing I do after bringing a system up
is roll my own kernel.
Sorry, this post is a bit disjointed because I originally thought you
were talking about what debian provides as kernel source, but then
realized that you were (probably?) talking about the packages. I know
little about the packages.
--
monique
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