On Thu, Aug 05, 2004 at 04:19:55PM -0700, Ian Romanick wrote:
> >module and the card dependant one.. I can see people building their own
> >card drivers from the DRM CVS and trying to load them vs a kernel with a
> >built-in DRM core.. my current thinking on this is we use the Kconfig to
> >try and ban it (I hope it is flexible enough)... so if a kernel has a
> >built-in drm library CVS won't build against it, and we won't build DRM
> >modules unless the library is a module ..
I think thats the way to go. Try and get things in the mainline kernel quick enough, or maybe even do the work there (Its the reason we have things like CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL). If you reduce the incentive for folks to grab bits from another source, this problem goes away.
It goes away, but it's replaced by other, equally annoying, problems.
> I guess one (unpleasant) way to make it work would be to add the version > to all the symbols in the device-independent layer. Instead of drm_foo > you'd have drm_foo_100 or drm_foo_101 or whatever. You could then have > multiple modules loaded or a module loaded with a built-in version. I'm > not sure how happy that would make the kernel maintainers (not to > mention how happy it would make us). :( It's basically like what we > have now, except the current code has the device's name add to all the > symbols and is built into the device-dependent module. Ugh, ugh.
"Ugh" is putting things very politely 8-) Whilst I realise we don't live in a perfect world, and getting interfaces right first time is hard, I'd really like to warn about the horrors of versioned ioctl's and the like.
Yeah....we already deal with various varieties of user-kernel interface versioning. Having to version kernel-kernel interfaces is the stuff that makes a developer want to become a monk or something.
> How do other multi-layer kernel modules handle this? For example, how > does agpgart or iptables do it?
For agpgart it hasn't really been an issue as all the development there in the last year or two has been done in tree. Yes, there has been some work on things like i915 out-of-tree, but that stuff has been merged up pretty quickly.
agpgart also has the advantage of there being only one AGP controller in the system. The issue I'm stating to worry more and more about is the user with multiple graphics cards...
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