At Mon, 06 Aug 2007 23:10:00 -1000, david wrote: > > Arnold Krille wrote: > > Am Montag, 6. August 2007 schrieb Fons Adriaensen: > >> I assume most drivers are using the same interfaces to the > >> kernel, and the same services, and that these are relatively > >> stable. > >> But I could be completely wrong... > > > > Well, the kernel devs seem to change some interfaces rather often in binary > > incompatible ways. And sometimes even on purpose (to drive away blob-drivers > > like nvidia)... > > > > So it can be that one of these changes introduced a bug hard to find and > > affecting only very few drivers. And as the developers will probably all have > > the lastest kernels, they don't want to wast time by debugging a problem > > fixed two kernel versions ago just because the user has 2.6.4 installed and > > doesn't use a half decent distro... > > Note: a decent distro (I've used several) doesn't necessarily have the > "latest" kernel - cuz the latest may still be in the very unstable realm. No more true. Distros nowadays try to pick up the latest one as much as possible. Take a look at recent openSUSE, Ubuntu, etc. Of course, it's adventurous to switch to early -rc kernel. But the released kernel is supposed to be stable. This reduces the maintenance a lot. However, distros stick with the older kernel version for their "business" products, mainly for keeping the 100% binary and source compatibility, which many ISVs prefer. IOW, it's just the matter of money :) > I know I've switched to newer kernels in the past and had whole bunches > of devices quit working - for instance, had USB quit working completely. > On one, networking quit working entirely, too. So when some developer > tells me to "test again using the latest kernel," perhaps you understand > why I'm not exactly eager to go do that? Yeah, I can understand it, of course. I have a bunch of machines with older kernels, too. But, you understand that if no report back from the tester, the bug will be left simply broken? Testing is a part of development cycle, and testing on the same environment is the important factor, as I mentioned. Takashi _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user
