Re: Version(s) working with BlizzardPPC

[Andreas <aw...@sw...>]

Hi Kulwant

On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 23:48, Kulwant Bhogal wrote:

> Hello Alan, 
> 
> Thanks for your mail. 
> 
> >> Is someone working on 2.4.23? I do find it strange that an older version
> >> is more compatible than a new version. I also wonder how many versions
> >> of the
> 
> > many many changes were being undertaken to the kernel during the 2.4.x
> > lifetime and each change usually killed something that wasnt/isnt being
> > maintained (look at the serial interface support etc) 
> 
> That sounds a bit sad. Why is that, surely not to limit the size to fit on a
> 1.44Mb floppy or something as daft as that?

No. Normal updates to drivers etc. Mostly adding support for newer
machines (ok, besides vm changes.. ;) ).

> I can't understand why adding
> new features has to disturb existing/working features - especially if they
> have no common bits (I mean what has settting the clock while booting got to
> do with serial i/f support????).

I think he was just talking about serial support as an example for
something being broken during the evolution of the 2.4.x kernel series.

Problem is, that code which is shared by many different
machines/architectures (think general stuff) gets altered e.g. to
accommodate new hardware. This mostly works for the commonly used
architectures since these people work with x86 etc. and there are a lot
of people testing this stuff. Unfortunately, these modifications every
now and then break the not so common architectures (be it because they
use preprocessor switches to in/exclude particular lines of code, and
x86 developers don't know about the impact their changes have on other
architectures, etc.). Since we are not tracking the rc kernels, no one
can test this stuff and bug the developer in charge for the change, and
if something gets broken, there's also noone to fix it..

-- 
Best wishes,
Andi