You can thank Dell for working with various Linux distribution groups for working to get this out. According to Dell, this separate framework for delivering drivers will remove kernel releases as a blocking mechanism for distributing code. The net effect, Dell hopes, is to speed up driver development by enabling quicker testing cycles. This also means that better tested code can be pushed back into the kernel at a more rapid pace. It's also nice for developers and maintainers, as DKMS only requires a source tarball in conjunction with a small configuration file in order to function correctly. Driver development has been a sore spot for Linux, so I'm pretty sure this is a welcomed development.
come back Dell, all is forgiven - good news - however i like messing with Linux, that will take out all the fun
so DKMS does for the kernel what apt does for debian? but since this isn't the tradition way of updating the kernel, will we still need to reboot the machine? thats got me thinking, how do you update your kernel if you can't restart your machine? (it would also take the uptime back to zero)
even then, its worse for servers, but its now amazing home users. Restarting a computer for the normal person is not that big of an issue.
Automatic updating could cause some problems. Let's say you've compiled some drivers into the kernel (nvidia drivers, mac80211 subsystem). If the kernel is updated without you knowing, then at the next reboot you're surprised that some things don't work anymore. And then you need to find out what went wrong. But I hope that you can set the updating system to manual, so you can choose what updates that you want.
Given that even Microsoft doesn't mandate automatic updates for Windows, I can't see this happening with Linux. Snowball's chance in hell, really.
