On Fri, 2009-11-20 at 13:07 -0800, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote: > On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 1:00 PM, Ben Hutchings > <bhutchings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Fri, 2009-11-20 at 12:45 -0800, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote: > >> Everyone and their mother reinvents the wheel when it comes to > >> backporting kernel modules. It a painful job and it seems to me an > >> alternative is possible. If we can write generic compatibilty code for > >> a new routine introduced on the next kernel how about just merging it > >> to the kernel under some generic compat module. This would be > >> completey ignored by everyone using the stable kernel but can be > >> copied by anyone doing backport work. > >> > >> So I'm thinking something as simple as a generic compat/comat.ko with > >> compat-2.6.32.[ch] files. > >> > >> We've already backported everything needed for wireless drivers under > >> compat-wireless under this format down to even 2.6.25. > > [...] > > > > If you think 2.6.25 is old then I don't think you understand the scale > > of the problem. > > > > OEMs still expect us to support RHEL 4 (2.6.9) and SLES 9 (2.6.5) though > > the latter will probably be dropped soon. Some other vendors apparently > > still need to support even 2.4 kernels! > > Heh understood. Well shouldn't this help with that then? Sure I'd love > to see the Enteprise Linux releases on 2.6.31 but that's not going to > happen right? Shouldn't this help then? You'd really have to ask the 'enterprise' vendors whether they'd be interested in working on some sort of shared forward-compat library. If the library is to include a module rather than being statically linked into each module that needs it then there can only be one instance in the system. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings, Senior Software Engineer, Solarflare Communications Not speaking for my employer; that's the marketing department's job. They asked us to note that Solarflare product names are trademarked. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
