Messages in this thread |  | | From | (Linus Torvalds) | Subject | Re: 2.4.1-pre1 breaks XFree 4.0.2 and "w" | Date | 12 Jan 2001 10:35:24 -0800 |
| |
In article <E14H8PC-0004hZ-00@the-village.bc.nu>, Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote: >> The fact that 2.2.x has bad control over capabilities and is messy is NOT >> an excuse to screw up forever. > >2.2 has a mix of 'can I use' and 'does the cpu have' so using 2.2 as an >example doesnt work
The above was exactly what I meant by being messy and not having a good control over capabilities, so I think it's a perfect example.
The fact is, we've historically NOT had a good way of indicating which features the kernel can try to take advantage of. This is something that 2.4.0 tries to fix - to have everything in one central place with no way to get mixed up about whether the CPU has some feature or not. And then export that single source knowledge through /proc/cpuinfo.
I happen to believe that it's a big advantage to have just a single source of capability data, AND to have that capability data be available to user mode - with no way for the user to be confused ("But /proc/cpuinfo _said_ that the kernel had FXSR, why can't I use it?").
Andreas argument was that earlier kernels weren't consistent, and as such we shouldn't even bother to try to make newer kernels consistent. We would be better off reporting our internal inconsistencies the way earlier kernels did - the kernel would be confusing, but at least it would be consistently confusing ;)
I don't buy that argument. I don't care that we got details like this wrong before.
Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
|  |