When to burn those bridges

[Scott Long]

On Wed, 10 Sep 2003, Doug Rabson wrote:

> On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 02:03, M. Warner Losh wrote:
> > If there's a really compelling reason (and this would be it), we can
> > burn some bridges early.  I wouldn't hold up your development based on
> > these bridges being in harm's way.  Others in the BSDcon terminal room
> > are saying "do it now, screw waiting for 6".  If you can get it done
> > and solid, I'd do it before the branch.  The drivers in harm's way
> > either have out of tree replacements, or aren't that important, or
> > need to be redone and this is a good excuse.
>
> If I commit this work to -current now, it will break ABI compatibility
> with 5.1-RELEASE. When is the ABI for 5.x suppose to be frozen? Does it
> matter if I break the 5.1 ABI in current? For what its worth, this
> change will also make the kobj method dispatch SMP safe (without locks).

The 5.x ABI and API will not be stable until 5.3.  This work looks
very encouraging; please go ahead and do what you need to do to
implement it.  I'm not sure if Justin has any thoughts on your approach
or if he cares to revive his newbus work, but you might want to check
with him just to be sure.

Scott