Linux kernel compatability

[Garrett Wollman]

In article <20110104032143$6d5e at grapevine.csail.mit.edu>, Jeff
Roberson writes:

>The original OFED porting effort I did with John Polstra and the people at 
>Isilon was never updated to my knowledge.  It was more mechanical changes 
>and 'felt' more like FreeBSD but fell so far out of date as to be useless. 
>Interestingly there was originally a porting layer in the ofed stack back 
>as it originally compiled on many operating systems.  However the 
>opensource effort focused on linux and the linux people wouldn't take it 
>without the shims removed.

And that, I am absolutely, 100% willing to ascribe to malice on the
Linux kernel developers' part.  (And there's more than one example
like this, not all of them as easily resolved,[1] due to issues with
licensing and ownership of original-vendor-abandoned code.)

Fundamentally, maintaining any sort of Linux compatibility is a losing
battle, since the hordes will keep on rototilling interfaces in every
release until the cows come home, with no concern (and in many cases
utter contempt) for anyone else who might need to maintain kernel
code.  It's a testament to their size and ability that they have
managed to keep the system relatively usable and stable over the long
term when major parts of the system get replaced on such a regular
basis.

-GAWollman

[1] If you can call "removing support for other operating systems"
"resolving".