this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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Device drivers are not like other software in at least one important way: They have access to and depend on kernel internals which are not visible to applications, and they need to be rebuilt when those change. Something as huge and complicated as a GPU driver depends on quite a lot of them. The kernel does not provide a stable binary interface for drivers so they will frequently need to be recompiled to work with new versions of linux, and then less frequently the source code also needs modification as things are changed, added to, and improved.
This is not unique to Linux, it's pretty normal. But it is a deliberate choice that its developers made, and people generally seem to think it was a good one.
That sounds like a stupid idea to me. But what do I know? I live in the ivory tower of application development where APIs are well-defined and stable.
Thanks for explaining.
You're re-opening the microkernel vs monlithic kernel debate with that. For fun you can read how Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds debated the question in 1992 here: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/c/wlhw16QWltI