Re:The Jury Is In: Monolithic OS Design Is Flawed [pdf]
by drewg123 on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @01:55PM
(#17768155)
RHEL does provide a stable kernel ABI (kABI) that can be and is used by vendors to ship binary drivers. See https://elrepo.org/tiki/FAQ
When I worked for a NIC hardware vendor, we would ship our driver in 4 forms:
1) source tarball
2) upstream kernel
3) RHEL/Centos kABI compliant source and binary rpms
4) Debian pkg using dkms
The upstream kernel driver wasn't good enough for a variety of reasons. For example, on Ubuntu LTS and RHEL, the in-tree driver was often based on a kernel that was several years old and which lacked support for recent hardware or features.
When I worked for a NIC hardware vendor, we would ship our driver in 4 forms:
1) source tarball
2) upstream kernel
3) RHEL/Centos kABI compliant source and binary rpms
4) Debian pkg using dkms
The upstream kernel driver wasn't good enough for a variety of reasons. For example, on Ubuntu LTS and RHEL, the in-tree driver was often based on a kernel that was several years old and which lacked support for recent hardware or features.