Originally posted by oiaohm
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This is different to change of behavior or just basic regressions in tests. If there was broken backwards compatibility the tests wouldn't even run.
Also an important to thing to note is that the tests themselves could be partially invalid which can happen legitimately for many reasons (i.e. incorrect assumptions, new alpha/beta written software which isn't complete yet, etc etc). Considering we are talking about code paths which no one is even really using (because it currently doesn't work irrespective of the the current change) this isn't that surprising and its the exact same thing that piotrj3 was talking about earlier.
There is also the concept of breaking userspace which is again different and this does sometimes happen (even outside the context of NVidia) and again sometimes it can legitimately be done, typically for security reasons or if something is so broken that barely anyone uses it anyways. While the Kernel is typically really strict about not breaking userspace there have been exceptions and what we are talking about right now is one of those exceptions because currently it doesn't even work.
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