But in 15 years, those interfaces -will- still be around if they're not
yanked out. Also, much of the "code-bloat" in the major releases is the
addition of drivers and other code that can be conditionally compiled.
However, right now I don't believe there's a CONFIG_VFS. Besides, we have
had at least one thread recently about eliminating the three-argument
mount syscall. And that's one syscall. We usually give ourselves more
flexibility in our internal interfaces.
Backwards-compatibility is good, but most of that doesn't belong in the
(unpageable) kernel.
With a completely open development cycle, and massive amounts of
communication directly to the developers available (such as with
linux-kernel), any changes made to internal kernel interfaces (which are
seldom unnecessary) are open to discussion to any interested party.
In any case, at least with the current "generation" of developers here, I
doubt that any unused interface will stay around too long, nor will there
be many frivolous changes to kernel interfaces. :)
-- Robert Minichino Denarius Enterprises, Inc. http://www.denarius.com/
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/