Re: Changes to sysfs PM layer break userspace

From: Matthew Garrett
Date: Tue Dec 19 2006 - 19:26:20 EST


On Tue, Dec 19, 2006 at 01:34:49PM -0800, David Brownell wrote:

> Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt has warned about this since
> August, and the PM list has discussed how broken that model is numerous
> times over the past several years. (I'm pretty sure that discussion has
> leaked out to LKML on occasion.) It shouldn't be news today.

1) feature-removal-schedule.txt says that it'll be removed in July 2007.
This isn't July 2007.

2) The functionality was disabled in 2.6.19. The addition to
feature-removal-schedule.txt was in, uh, 2.6.19.

3) "The whole _point_ of a kernel is to act as a abstraction layer and
resource management between user programs and hardware/outside world.
That's why kernels _exist_. Breaking user-land API's is thus by
definition something totally idiotic.

If you need to break something, you create a new interface, and try to
translate between the two, and maybe you deprecate the old one so that
it can be removed once it's not in use any more. If you can't see that
this is how a kernel should work, you're missing the point of having a
kernel in the first place."

Linus, http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/10/4/327

--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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