Translations:NVIDIA/nvidia-drivers/97/en

From time to time, a new kernel release changes the internal ABI for drivers, which means all drivers that use those ABIs must be changed accordingly. For open source drivers, especially those distributed with the kernel, these changes are nearly trivial to fix since the entire chain of calls between drivers and other parts of the kernel can be reviewed quite easily. For proprietary drivers like nvidia.ko, it doesn't work quite the same. When the internal ABIs change, then it is not possible to merely fix the "glue", because nobody knows how the glue is used by the proprietary part. Even after managing to patch things up to have things seem to work nicely, the user still risks that running nvidia.ko in the new, unsupported kernel will lead to data loss and hardware failure.