Standalone Device Drivers in Linux

However, this traditional scheme has a number of major disadvantages. First of all, it means that each version of the device driver is linked to a specific version of the kernel. So if a device is only supported in a development release, a customer who might otherwise want to use a stable, production release might be forced to use a bleeding-edge system. Alternatively, there may be bugs present in the device driver as included in the stable release of the kernel, but which are fixed in the development kernel.