Care to elaborate on this?
I clearly understand nothing of this, but it always felt confused about it. Why won't Linux aim for ABI stability? Wouldn't that be a win for everyone involved?
I clearly understand nothing of this, but it always felt confused about it. Why won't Linux aim for ABI stability? Wouldn't that be a win for everyone involved?
(all of your questions answered and then some)
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...
See Windows or android GKI for existence proof that it can be done if so motivated.
Of course Redhat can put what they want into their distro, but there are a lot of choices beyond that.
It makes sense for MS, for example, to want a stable ABI to make things easier for 3rd-party devs so they'll target that platform, and for MS to shoulder the effort of maintaining that ABI cumbersomeness. It doesn't really makes sense for Linux. You could argue that this hampers adoption of Linux as an alternative to Windows on desktop machines, but even if that's true, no one involved really has an economic incentive to change this. In the places where Linux is dominant (Android + servers + embedded), a stable ABI isn't really helpful or needed.
So the Linux devs are really against it both from a lack of resources point of view, and from an ideological "we hate closed source" point of view.
Unfortunately, most vendors with closed source drivers don't give a shit about ideology and simply provide binaries for very specific Linux releases. That means users end up getting screwed because they are stuck on those old Linux versions and can't upgrade.
The Linux devs have this strange idea that vendors will see this situation as bad and decide that the best option is to open source their code, but that never happens. Even Google couldn't get them to do that. This is one of the main reasons that Android OS updates are not easy and universal.