Re: Nobody should ever need to patch the kernel!!

On Fri, 13 Oct 2006 14:30:35 +0200 angryatlinux <angryatlinux@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
| Nikolaos D. Bougalis wrote:
|>> You cannot enable ACPI without a patch (ok I think now it made into
|>> the kernel, but it used to need a patch)
|>
|> ACPI support required a patch because it was not included in
|> mainline, until the developers decided it was stable enough to include.
|> That makes a lot of sense to me. What would you have done, if it were up
|> to you? Merge it right away, and crash thousands of systems because of
|> broken ACPI support?
|
| Various people replied this thing about ACPI. These people haven't
| understood what I'm writing! I'm not complaining because there are
| things available as patch vs directly in the kernel, I'm complaining
| because there are things available in patches vs in modules!

No, you were complaining that some things which operate as modules also
need a patch to the kernel as well. Many modules you might choose to
configure in when you compile a kernel also include the needed hooks.


| ACPI is one example, Kprobes is another one... ok I was mistaken with
| the file monitoring and shfs.
|
| Patches are a hell to maintain, see my first post for why, useless to
| repeat here.

External patches do have that problem. But if the patch were rolled into
the mainline kernel source tree, then it would be just that much more for
teh kernel maintainers to do, too, in addition to a larger kernel. That's
not worth doing unless enough people want it.

Microsoft does seem to put a lot more in Windows. Every business that can
afford to pay them off to include something can probably get it in there.
They we all pay for having a larger kernel, more bugs, and mroe security
issues, when we're not using something better.

--
|---------------------------------------/----------------------------------|
| Phil Howard KA9WGN (ka9wgn.ham.org) / Do not send to the address below |
| first name lower case at ipal.net / spamtrap-2006-10-13-1319@xxxxxxxx |
|------------------------------------/-------------------------------------|
.

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