What makes a production kernel?

[Andrew Farris]

On Sun, 2004-04-25 at 15:59 -0400, Tom Diehl wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Apr 2004, Eric Hattemer wrote:

> > to say that FC2 doesn't support it may be a serious issue for some 
> > people.  I know most people don't care about the savage driver, but I 
> > wonder if a new one will ever be released.  I don't think its a good 
> > idea at this time to include a default kernel that isn't backward 
> > compatible in this respect to the older ones. 
> 
> Like it or not if you buy a closed piece of hardware this is what you
> get.

In my opinion, just because the driver is closed source does not mean
there can be no improvement in how nVIDIA and linux developers work
together... and there should be improvement (in both directions).
Nevertheless, cutting edge changes cannot be made without breaking the
old, unchanged drivers -- the changes will not be made pro-actively by
the vendors because making those changes costs them money.  They play
catchup, and probably always will (at least until their support of Linux
becomes a legitimate economic expense in comparison to support of the
competing OS).

> What I fail to see is why people buy this crap from companies and then
> whine on these lists that it does not work. This is just plain stupid.
> Do you really think whining that you screwed up on these lists is going
> to change anything?? PLEASE PLEASE go whine to NVIDIA, or buy from a
> hardware vendor who is interested in supporting open source.

Yes, people should whine elsewhere (to the vendors) but there is no
vendor providing high performance hardware with fully open source
drivers.  If you can direct me to a company that does provide equivalent
hardware without closed drivers, please do.  It is just as silly for you
to suggest they buy other products as it is for them to whine in the
wrong public arena.

The correct location for this discussion is
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=14.

It is nVIDIA's responsibility to maintain the driver, and by all
indications from the past they will do so a short time after the
mainstream acceptance of the kernel changes that break their driver (the
~6 month average release time draws near).  It would be pleasant for
them to have fixed the problem already... but you don't know they
haven't, so wait and see.

It is interesting to consider the same situation with the release of
Windows XP... where the nVIDIA driver base for Windows 2000 was
extremely unstable for use in XP for several months after the public
release.  Did Microsoft not release XP, nope.
(there was probably more unilateral cooperation in that situation)
-- 
Andrew Farris, CPE senior (California Polytechnic State University, SLO)
fedora at andrewfarris.com :: lmorgul on irc.freenode.net
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men
to do nothing." (Edmond Burke)