On Fri, 2008-09-12 at 10:02 +0000, Tzafrir Cohen wrote: <snip> > That may be true for an out-of-tree modules. However, let's recall that > Fedora ships with Latest kernel and Debian (Stable) doesn't. Hence > Debian should be more concerened with backporting. Right now Debian does have the latest stable kernel. I think Fedora is trying to set high standards for what it includes (out-of-tree drivers are mostly crap) but at the expense of providing what its users actually need. (I suppose people make the same criticism of Debian over the strict application of DFSG - and yet we are pragmatic about that as well; we still have a non-free section in the archive.) > (Discalimer: I work for a company that ships hardware using a badly > out-of-tree module. I work for a company that ships hardware using a module that was out-of-tree for several years. > While we try to fix that, there is little we can do. I very much doubt that. > One of the arguments used by those opposing getting that code into the > kernel is the longer release cycle that would mean it takes some monthes > from the time we're done with internal QA till customers start using the > code) Some of our customers and prospective customers, which are mostly OEMs, demanded that we work to get our driver in-tree. This is presumably because that gets it into distributions and reduces their installation and support burden in the long-term. It also ensures a certain amount of code review, further reducing their support burden. We also benefit from that review and from having the in-tree driver updated in the future together with kernel APIs. At the same time, we - and you - will still need to support an out-of-tree driver on older kernels and to cover new hardware. If you install a new version of the module in /lib/modules/$version/updates then that takes precedence over the old version. (This is hard-coded into depmod.) (DKMS actually moves the old version out of the way and moves the new version into its place. I think we might want to modify that behaviour in Debian, perhaps using dpkg-divert.) Ben.
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