4KSTACKS again

[Andy Ross]

This was posted last week, but didn't generate much in the way of
official response.  Now that I've played with the issue some and feel
I have a better understanding, I thought I'd try again:

FC2 kernels, since the early days of test1, have been compiled to use
the "4KSTACKS" patch on i386 which limits kernel stacks to a single
page.  This feature is incompatible with some proprietary kernel
modules, most notably the NVidia (and, I am told but have not
verified, ATI) graphics drivers.  Users of these modules have been
forced to recompile their kernels after modifying the CONFIG_4KSTACKS
setting.

But recent 2.6.5-x kernels have removed even that option, making it
*impossible* for NVidia users to generate a working system from the
kernel-source package.

Note that the official 2.6.5 kernel doesn't have the small stack
feature at all, and works fine.  The kernel SRPM adds a patch ("mc1")
which includes the 4KSTACKS features, and then another ("nostack")
which inexplicably *removes* the configurability of the feature, thus
hard-wiring (!) the kernel source to use 4K stacks.

So basically: Is this intentional?  Why?  I clearly understand
(please, no flames on this point) that neither Red Hat nor the Fedora
project are required to support proprietary software.  But this
removal of the configuration setting is *gratuitous* incompatibility.
What was the purpose?  Do you really intend to ship such a kernel in
the official release?  Have you at least pinged NVidia (and ATI, if
necessary) to see if they're willing or able to fix the issue prior to
the FC2 release?

Honestly, shipping a (non-standard!) kernel feature which disallows
accelerated 3D for a large fraction of users is going to be a
disaster.  I work on the FlightGear project, and forcing our linux
users to download and compile their own kernel from kernel.org is just
not an option; they'll just get pushed off to other distributions.

Andy