On Thu, 2006-08-03 at 06:45 +0100, Jon Masters wrote:
What this stuff does for you (I prefered the other poster's use
of
language...) is help in the case that a security errata or other minor
kernel update forces itself upon you. Not everyone (read: most people)
view recompiling modules every ten minutes as a good idea, so if a new
kernel is kABI compatible with existing modules, those are
automatically made available. I know Fedora doesn't have a stable
kABI,
nor do RHEL or SLES or any other distro in practice[*] ;)
Recompiling really is no big deal; DKMS shows how you can make it
transparent and without the need of user input for the case the API
didn't change (and if the API changed.. then the ABI for sure changed).
Is that "pain" really so big that it's worth all the subtle but nasty
data corruptions you risk if an ABI change slips through your tools?
[*] despite the best efforts from some marketing departments to claim
the contrary.