[kuschku]

The big issue with this is the – afterwards you always know better – completely stupid decision of Torvalds to never support a stable API for kernel modules, or drivers.

A similar issue happened recently between AMD and the kernel maintainers (AMD wanted a stable API for GPU drivers that would allow the same drivers to run on Windows, Mac, desktop Linux, and Android; and AMD had already built this API and was willing to maintain it).

In the end, this can only be solved if the Linux kernel gets a stable driver API, and with Oreo, Google added exactly that for their own fork of the kernel.

[majewsky]

> The big issue with this is the – afterwards you always know better – completely stupid decision of Torvalds to never support a stable API for kernel modules, or drivers.

It's not stupid. APIs need to change eventually. Even famously backwards-compatible Windows has its fair share of API changes. And when public APIs change, you can either drop support for the old one (thereby also dropping support for old hardware), or provide a compatibility mapping from the old to the new API (if that is even possible).

Linus knows that he does not have the manpower to do either. All he can realistically do is only support the current API, and require devs who change the API to update all usages inside the kernel source tree when doing so.

[kuschku]

There’s several problems with this.

(a) all drivers live in kernel space, even the sketchy drivers you have to download from NVIDIA

(b) if a driver wants to be included easily, it needs to become part of the kernel source tree, but that can only happen if Torvalds and his maintainers get full control.

(c) the API is broken with every release

As a result of all of this, the kernel maintainers refused even in any way to cooperate with AMD on their open driver (AMD needs a stable layer at some point to run the same additional functionality on windows, mac, and linux – the alternative is no linux support), we get ancient drivers on Android, with Google building their own HAL, and more shit.

At the same time, the syscalls, where maintaining a stable API is completely irrelevant and could simply be done via a small userspace library that you call to instead of doing actual syscalls, and which also massively would improve security if the translation between old and new syscalls would happen in userspace, is the one thing Torvalds maintains in the kernel.

The decisions made by Torvalds are reckless, massively hurt security and usability of open source, and the entire concept of open source ("we’d rather have only a proprietary AMD driver than an open AMD driver that relies on an HAL").