[LWN Logo]

Date:	Sun, 13 Sep 1998 10:14:09 -0700 (PDT)
From:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
To:	Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Subject: Re: 2.1.121 breaks compilation, initmem_freed undefined



On Sun, 13 Sep 1998, Alan Cox wrote:
> > 
> > No, the code did NOT make any sense.
> 
> It made complete sense

It made sense on a microscopic level, in the sense that it did what it was
supposed to do. Yes. But no, it didn't make SENSE. 

It did not make sense on _any_ system design level. And that's what I make
my judgement calls on. 

The problem is that I consider any driver that tries to "know" the
bootsequence to be a very very broken driver. We had that problem several
years ago, where a driver that was a module had a very different boot
sequence than a driver that was compiled in. It results in complete and
utter confusion, because a driver ends up working/notworking according to
whether it was installed as a module or not.

I fixed that, and people complained because I broke a lot of drivers. 
Tough luck, they got fixed, and we're the better for it, because the old
code did not make sense - different memory management depending on whether
they were compiled in or drivers. 

Using "initmem_freed" does not make sense, in the very same very real
manner. A driver should know effing all about the boot sequence, and
should not care. If it does, it is broken, because it then gets broken
when I change the boot sequence. Comprende? 

So what happened was that I cleaned up the boot sequence, and no
well-written drivers broke. That should give you some food for thought. I
didn't need to touch any of the drivers I use.

I'd like to re-iterate: I _maintain_ the kernel. And because I do that, it
makes _no_ sense to me to have drivers (or anything else, for that matter)
that "know" about internal mm details.

Case dismissed, "initmem_freed" is never going back in, exactly because
the _only_ reason for having it is to support bad code that has spagetti-
like knowledge of some arcane thing that it shouldn't know about.

		Linus


-
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/faq.html