Linked by Hadrien Grasland on Tue 24th May 2011 14:38 UTC, submitted by Debjit
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RE[2]: What's so bad about...
by Neolander on Wed 25th May 2011 07:14
in reply to "RE: What's so bad about..."
I think that in Linux's case, one should better look at the user space point of view, since they made it pretty clear that they didn't support third-party drivers.
As an example of user-space breakage, sound handling has heavily changed from 2.4 to 2.6 (OSS has been deprecated and gradually dropped). This has caused some issues in user space.




Member since:
2011-01-28
Neolander,
"...backwards compatibility breakage.features.security/bugfix ?"
The trouble is, just about every version of the linux kernel breaks things at the source level.
I patch the kernel with AUFS because I need a union FS. However Linux maintainers have steadfastly refuse to incorporate any unionfs into the kernel (which is a topic for a different debate).
So anyways, I always try compiling the latest version of AUFS against the latest Linux kernel, and most of the time it doesn't work because linux added new arguments, moved functions around, changed structures, etc. Generally the easiest solution is just to use an older kernel, but I once needed a newer kernel and had to hack the AUFS drivers to fit.
The kernel devs say this encourages people to contribute their code back into mainline (to relieve them of the maintenance burden), but what about all the code they reject?
Or do you mean userspace breakage? Have any userspace syscalls been changed since the beginning?