Jose Maria Lopez wrote: [snip]
there are things simply impossible.
Impossible? There's no such thing ;-)
I don't see the difference with Solaris. If you want to upgrade your Solaris you have to apply a lot of upgrades, also to the kernel. That's the impression I have from the little contact I had with Solaris.
Not really. Solaris (well, SunOS actually) has "disadvantage" of being closed-source. So Sun had to publish API and document data structures garanteed not to change in set period of time (as defined in Solaris device driver development guides). That allows for a third party to provide loadable kernel module that works with current version of Solaris kernel (both generic and patched), and possibly future versions of Solaris kernel (up to some point). Of course, if developer doesn't wonder into the undocumented land ;-) More than once I used kernel module compiled for previous version of Solaris (one was driver for Sun's unfortunate BigMac ethernet card, don't remember exatly what the others were).
If there was such a thing in Linux kernel, bringing some of the new features might be a bit slower and harder task for core Linux developers (you can't just change that function call, or data structure), but on the other hand some of the "impossible" to implement features would become "possible"...
Becoming way off topic, anyhow...
-- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
