On Sun, 2004-11-21 at 17:07 -0500, Alan Cox wrote: > And you don't have a four minute reboot cycle each wrong guess ? Correct. I'd be surprised if you can't cut that down by using things like LinuxBIOS. For issues that aren't driver related, VMs? > I've been there and done it too. Its very different debugging code that you have > some expectation that a debugger will handle. Debuggers are often useless working on Wine. Many interesting programs like iTunes employ anti-debugger code. You typically have to go by logging frameworks, examining the code, etc. All the old-school techniques. For race conditions logging can be a problem too, but let's not go there. Horror stories can wait for some other time :) Anyway, I don't want to get into an arm-wrestle over who has it worse, let's just leave it at "it's possible but not easy" :) > Actually they seem to file bugs with trangaming and friends who in turn > filter some of them back to relevant places. When "shock rifle in game > foo hangs DRI" gets back to the DRI folks its suddenely rather useful to > have DRI source. Yeah, some users file bugs. That's not related to my original point which is that the hypothetical "if all users refused to use binary 3D drivers then vendors would have to open up some source" situation is silly. It's not going to happen anytime soon, so why discuss it? That sort of mass boycott *might* occasionally work for very emotive issues like Nestle baby-milk. It won't happen for something as complicated and specialist as open source nvidia drivers. > Except for all the drivers that don't work in XP, or are 98 only. I get so > much cool stuff off ebay cheap because the (often ex) vendor driver doesnt > work on 2K/XP. I'll take a few drivers not working on XP over not being able to buy a new wireless card that works with Linux. I've tried. The shop refused to take them back, I'd opened the packaging. The last one even had a penguin on the website, could probably do the vendors for trading standards. It's a worthless piece of plastic and metal to me now (chipset change w/ no model number change). Yeah I'll definitely take the Windows "occasionally might not work on XP" situation to the "almost certainly won't work on Linux" situation we have now, at least for wireless cards. And the situation has got worse not better. The only supported cards you can get these days seem to be obsolete. > An ABI is very very hard to handle. It also works against customers some > times - eg I long ago found a unix vendor bug that let anyone using rsh > control and reconfigure the networking stack. The engineer I knew fixed it > next day, it took a year to get out properly because it was a kernel ABI issue. Yeah, that's pretty much worst case example. > The same criteria apply in Linux land too. I fixed some nasty tty holes. That > needed an ABI change (and in a couple of cases API change). Would you prefer > an ABI or security ? I think most would accept that Linux is more secure than Windows currently in terms of worms and such, but most people use Windows. One reason is that Windows supports their hardware and software. So I guess the logical conclusion is that people do value compatibility more than security. This is for desktops, obviously. On servers it's probably the other way around. > Vendors do recognize the trade off. RHEL3 has a fixed ABI as best we can > manage it, but its a hard job. It's not really fixed. It's just that RHEL revs less often. The next rev will still be incompatible with the previous. > The original kernel had about 6K of stack you could use, but at least 2K of > that had to be free for IRQ handlers. The new kernel has separate stacks > for IRQ handlers so nothing has changed in available stack except that > abusers who would previously randomly crash the box now reliably crash it. > Thats an improvement in itself as unpredictable bugs are bad. OK. That makes sense. Still, I'm no stranger to working around bugs in popular programs - at the end of the day the purpose of an OS is to run the users programs and let them use their hardware. It's not to punish the user for buying stuff from vendors who write buggy software (which 3D card driver has never had bugs again?). thanks -mike -- Mike Hearn <mike@xxxxxxx>
