Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 13 Sep 1998 10:14:09 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: 2.1.121 breaks compilation, initmem_freed undefined |
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On Sun, 13 Sep 1998, Alan Cox wrote: > > > > No, the code did NOT make any sense. > > It made complete sense
It made sense on a microscopic level, in the sense that it did what it was supposed to do. Yes. But no, it didn't make SENSE.
It did not make sense on _any_ system design level. And that's what I make my judgement calls on.
The problem is that I consider any driver that tries to "know" the bootsequence to be a very very broken driver. We had that problem several years ago, where a driver that was a module had a very different boot sequence than a driver that was compiled in. It results in complete and utter confusion, because a driver ends up working/notworking according to whether it was installed as a module or not.
I fixed that, and people complained because I broke a lot of drivers. Tough luck, they got fixed, and we're the better for it, because the old code did not make sense - different memory management depending on whether they were compiled in or drivers.
Using "initmem_freed" does not make sense, in the very same very real manner. A driver should know effing all about the boot sequence, and should not care. If it does, it is broken, because it then gets broken when I change the boot sequence. Comprende?
So what happened was that I cleaned up the boot sequence, and no well-written drivers broke. That should give you some food for thought. I didn't need to touch any of the drivers I use.
I'd like to re-iterate: I _maintain_ the kernel. And because I do that, it makes _no_ sense to me to have drivers (or anything else, for that matter) that "know" about internal mm details.
Case dismissed, "initmem_freed" is never going back in, exactly because the _only_ reason for having it is to support bad code that has spagetti- like knowledge of some arcane thing that it shouldn't know about.
Linus
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