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

From: Doug Anderson
Date: Mon Feb 22 2016 - 22:03:51 EST


Mark,

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:24 PM, Mark Brown <broonie@xxxxxxxxxx> 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