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by witheld 1184 days ago
You’re practically not supposed to to build external modules. It’s supported to only the most minimal degree- Linus, and the Linux project, WANT you to build things in.

And as everyone else has told you, this is so that support for hardware is in Linux and in distros BEFORE users have to taint their kernels and create crazy bugs kernel devs have to deal with.

1 comments

> WANT you to build things in.

Only if you adhere to their standards, until very recently you couldn't even do rust. If i made something fully working in rust today it still wouldn't get accepted.

That’s exactly why they want you to do it with them though- so they can make you do it too their standards.
No it isn't. The reason you can't write external modules is because the kernel interfaces aren't stable. You would have to provide a module binary for every single kernel version (and maybe even for different configurations).

And the reason for that is mostly that providing a stable interface is a) a ton of work, and b) would make distributing closed source drivers easier which is something Linus hates.

if you read the mailing list, you know there’s a lot of reasons. Linus hates out of tree and closed modules for quite a number of reasons- but in this specific context it seems the most relevant.