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SubjectRe: [Announce] BKL shifting into drivers and filesystems - beware


On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
>
> We already have versioning with modver to enforce version mismatches.

It's not about version mismatches.

It's about getting at all the drivers easily, so that one person (or a
small team) can do a change that updates the interfaces for _everything_
in one fell swoop.

Which is actually how most of these things get done.

This is how people like Jeff Garzik can update the PCI initialization and
finding code for hundreds of drivers. This is how Al Viro can get at the
locking rules, and just update everything he can get his grubby hands on
in one go. This is, in short, how we can make big changes without having
to synchronize with every single maintainer of every single piece of the
system..

Version mismatches protect against mis-use, at least to some degree, and
at least of the accidental kind. But they don't allow for updating of
external drivers.

Note, for example, how ReiserFS has been mentioned a number of times in
the last week on Linux-kernel. That's because reiserfs has reached the
point where it's used by a lot of people, but it hasn't reached the point
where it has gotten integrated yet, so while the other filesystems were
updated to new VFS layer changes, ReiserFS missed out. So did the other
external ones, but they tend to have a more controlled user base so far:
ReiserFS has apparently already gotten "out".

Don't get me wrong. To some degree I would _love_ to not have a large
kernel archive. It's big, and it makes releases harder. No question about
that. But the monolithic approach definitely has a lot of advantages.

Linus


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