Post #1890203

2026-04-25 08:15 UTC

@kernellogger One thing that bothers me about this (not that I think it's anyone's fault, or that I have an easy solution) is the people that have a genuine need for these old drivers (like the guy who spoke up about the 905), but that _don't_ follow LKML closely. They will likely only find out about this a year or more later when that kernel makes it to their distro, and then they are SOL and will have to ask someone to maintain the patch that keeps the driver around, likely for lots of cash.

Replies (2)

@kernellogger@hachyderm.io 2026-04-25 09:25

@klausman what bothers me are people that expect 10+ or 15+ year old hardware to continue to work when jumping from one longterm kernel to the next without doing a dime to help with that in return for what they get for free. Because that shows that the #Linux #kernel community, or maybe the whole FLOSS ecosystem, is doing a bad job at communicating that developers and testers need to invest at least time and maybe money to ensure things continue to work. Which is why at some point things, at least for the #LinuxKernel with its "no regressions" policy, boil down to: "Unless somebody tests regularly (e.g., at least each new mainline version, better each new -rc1), things you care about might get broken and/or removed before it becomes hard or impossible to fix that". If a hardware is very widespread, there is a decent chance that somebody else will do that testing[1]; but over time you might need to become that "somebody" to prevent a unhappy outcome for yourself and others. [1] but hardware is tricky and has many warts that show up only in special environments. Maybe yours is one of those, so you might want to help with testing nevertheless. Which is a good way to give back to FLOSS.

Open ##1890204
@krzk@social.kernel.org 2026-04-26 08:51

@klausman @kernellogger There is no free lunch, so people who have "genuine need" of particular drivers need to pay with their testing of new kernel releases (LKML does not matter here - no one needs to read it). This applies to individual users or companies using some very old LTS. If they ever tested only their old LTS (imagine v4.4 with stunning 300 stable releases for 6 years of official support!), never moved their kernel for their products to any newer LTS, not even imagining testing newer standard release, what do they expect? That some maintainers will do the work for them for free? Free Software is free as in freedom of usage, not free of the effort. I think many forgot that and assume Linux comes for them for free as in free beer, thus they have no obligations and can be just consumers of it.

Open ##1890211