Mark, On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:24 PM, Mark Brown <broonie at kernel.org> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 11:15:09AM -0800, Doug Anderson wrote: > >> Note that historically I remember that Linus Torvalds has stated that >> there is no stable API within the Linux kernel and that forcing the >> in-kernel API to never change was bad for software development. I >> tracked down my memory and found >> <http://lwn.net/1999/0211/a/lt-binary.html>. Linus is rabid about not >> breaking userspace, but in general there's no strong requirement to >> never change the driver API inside the kernel. That being said, >> changing the driver API causes a lot of churn, so presumably changing >> it in a backward compatible way (like adding to the API instead of >> changing it) will make things happier. > > You do need to fix the users though, change is fine but you can't cause > people's systems to break. Yes, of course! :) Thanks for clarifying. -Doug
