[PATCH v3 00/12] pwm: add support for atomic update

Doug Anderson dianders at google.com
Mon Feb 22 19:03:44 PST 2016


Mark,

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:24 PM, Mark Brown <broonie at kernel.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 11:15:09AM -0800, Doug Anderson wrote:
>
>> Note that historically I remember that Linus Torvalds has stated that
>> there is no stable API within the Linux kernel and that forcing the
>> in-kernel API to never change was bad for software development.  I
>> tracked down my memory and found
>> <http://lwn.net/1999/0211/a/lt-binary.html>.  Linus is rabid about not
>> breaking userspace, but in general there's no strong requirement to
>> never change the driver API inside the kernel.  That being said,
>> changing the driver API causes a lot of churn, so presumably changing
>> it in a backward compatible way (like adding to the API instead of
>> changing it) will make things happier.
>
> You do need to fix the users though, change is fine but you can't cause
> people's systems to break.

Yes, of course!  :)  Thanks for clarifying.

-Doug



More information about the linux-arm-kernel mailing list