new kernel ... / meaning of stable-tracking

[Werner Almesberger]

Mike (mwester) wrote:
> None of the distros, and certainly not the kernel, are stable enough to
> ensure that any such code would actually remain running -- for every
> "solution" you come up with to insulate such a daemon from a failure,
> somebody somewhere will come up with another way to make it fail.

Well, if the kernel is dead, also the current hack wouldn't help you.

Besides, that platform-specific code would need to be separated from
the actual driver anyway, so the choice is not between leaving it
alone and replacing it, but between refactoring that mess and getting
rid of it for good.

> Of course Openmoko can just unilaterally do what you state, and force
> developers for every distro to invest huge amounts of effort in
> developing fail-safe watchdog daemons for their distros.

Yeah, that would indeed be unreasonable. So I sat down and wrote it
myself. Took about one and a half hours, most of which was spent on
figuring out how to interface with events and i2c-dev, which I've
never done before.

http://svn.openmoko.org/developers/werner/neodog/

I agree with you that the kernel still needs lots of work. But
wasting time on wrapping some more rolls of band-aid around things
we can fix properly doesn't help ...

- Werner