Problems with kernel updates needing non-kernel changes

[Jon Masters]

On Thu, 2007-03-22 at 13:05 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-03-22 at 12:54 -0400, Chuck Ebbert wrote:
> > 1) mkinitrd may need changing, e.g. the raid4, raid5 and raid6
> >    modules were combined into raid456 a while ago, breaking
> >    mkinitrd completely on raid machines.
> 
> There are a pile of other userspace packages that also commonly need
> updates.  alsa stuff, pcmcia, kudzu, udev/hal (less these days), ...

Oh don't count on that, I've got some plans to make udev/hal break a bit
more often...joke.

> > 2) some modules may now work that were broken, but they need
> >    new options, like snd-hda-intel which now works on my acer
> >    notebook if "probe_mask=1" is added to the module options.
> 
> This is just a case of broken drivers.  Having to manually
> (modprobe.conf counts :) specify a module option to make a driver work
> means that the driver is broken -- these things _have_ to be
> auto-detected.  Punting it to the user just isn't practical or
> reasonable.

Indeed. And options that are removed *must* be supported for a while. We
can't have modules that loaded previously now failing just because the
maintainer decided to remove a previously valid option without warning.
This needs strong upstream coercion on the part of those taking patches.

Jon.