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    SubjectRe: Binary drivers


    On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:

    > How about open-source stuff that *isn't* shipped with the kernel? (VMware's
    > drivers (?), iBCS (not that it accesses drivers directly --- I think), etc.)

    Want a lovely story about undead suckitude?

    Back in July '94 (1.1.35, IIRC), when Linux did not support block sizes
    other than 1024, somebody had thought that it would be cool to have
    swapfiles on FAT filesystems. Instead of doing the right thing the new
    interface was added: ->smap(). Same as bmap(), but works on sectors
    instead of blocks. Great. Fortunately, somebody else _did_ the right thing
    and did the support for other block sizes (late October '94, 1.1.60). At
    that moment ->smap() became obsolete. Especially since for FAT blocksize
    immediately became 512 bytes. All nice and dandy, everything happened
    within one development branch, so ->smap() was goner, right? Like hell it
    was. FPOS lingered around until _NOW_. Killed in 2.3.30-pre7. Should it be
    left around forever? I don't think so. Sorry. If it means recompile - so
    be it.


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