Comment by yjftsjthsd-h
13 hours ago
Linux doesn't even maintain ABI compatibility with itself, nobody else is going to manage it. The possibility that might work is there's a couple projects that maintain just enough API compatibility to reuse driver code from Linux (IIRC FreeBSD does this for some graphics drivers). But even then you're gambling with whether Linux decides to change implementation details one day, since internal APIs explicitly aren't stable.
The Linux kernel community takes ABI compatibility for userland very seriously. That developers in userland are frequently unwilling to understand issues surrounding ABI stability is not the fault of the Linux kernel.
Oh sure, the user-space ABI is stable; I meant kernel-space. Although I realize now that I failed to write that explicitly.
The past 30 years of the Linux kernel's evolution has proven that there is no need for a stable kernel ABI. That would make refactoring, adding new features and porting to new platforms exceedingly difficult. Pretty much all of the proprietary kernel modules have either become open source or been replaced by open source replacements. The Linux community doesn't need closed source kernel modules for VMWare anymore, and even Nvidia has finally given up on their closed source GPU drivers. Proprietary Linux kernel modules have no place in the modern world.
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