[asterisk-dev] Kernel modules => mainline kernel

[Paul Cadach]

Oron Peled wrote:
> On Monday, 12 בFebruary 2007 02:56, Paul Cadach wrote:
>> +1. Keeping fastly growing asterisk/zaptel project in sync with much 
>> slower
>> kernel is a headache.
>
> Calling the general kernel development "much slower" than zaptel (not
> asterisk) must be some private joke (you are invited to read lkml for a
> few days to understand what I mean).
>
> One of the problematic side effects of this change rate is that internal
> kernel API's often break. This does not pose a serious problem for 
> "in-tree"
> drivers, since they get updated with the rest of the kernel.

zaptel depends on generic kernel API which changes much slower than 
drivers/VFS/networking/etc. Many experimental/development changes isn't get 
into production kernels, so this is better to track such changes which gets 
into official kernels come with Linux distributions (like Fedora Core, 
Debian, Ubuntu, etc.).

> IMHO you are looking at this from the wrong POV. If zaptel was in
> mainline kernel. 90% of *asterisk* users would not have to install
> any driver for their hardware to work out of the box (the 10% are
> those with special needs, e.g: developers). IMO, hardware should just
> work out of the box.

How much zaptel hardware available at the market? How many people uses such 
hardware? IMHO not more than 10% of all Linux installations around the 
world.

Zaptel is not motherboard's chipset which should be well-maintained.

When zaptel/asterisk will get stable/rock-solid API, where would be nice to 
include it to mainstream kernel tree, but at present days there is really 
many changes in drivers/etc. so getting it to the kernel will slow down 
development process.


Similar question - why VMWare's drivers isn't maintained with kernel? IMHO 
because they mostly depend on VMware host software, not on the kernel 
version (you can use 20+ kernel versions with the same host software and one 
kernel with 5 versions of host software).


WBR,
Paul.