Re: Proposal for a userspace "architecture portability" library

[Robert Love <rml@novell.com>]

On Sun, 2004-12-05 at 11:53 +1100, Paul Mackerras wrote:

> Some of our kernel headers implement generally useful abstractions
> across all of the architectures we support.  I would like to make an
> "architecture portability" library, based on the kernel headers but as
> a separate project from the kernel, and intended for use in userspace.

I think that this is an _awesome_ idea.  Might want to check out what
overlap there is with existing glibc interfaces.  For example, I presume
that glibc implements at least some of the atomic operations (but I also
think having a full suite of atomic operations available is useful).

Some of the stuff, like semaphores, isn't really going to port very well
to user-space.  At least not directly, I would not think.

But on numerous occasions I have wanted the kernel's barriers, atomic
operations, bitwise operations, or some of the compiler things we
implement (likely, unlikely, fixes) in user-space.

> Now, clearly I can do this under the GPL.  However, I think it would
> be more useful to have the library under the LGPL, which requires
> either getting the permission of the authors of the kernel files, or
> rewriting them from scratch.

FWIW, you have my permission.  I've touched spinlock.h a bunch.

	Robert Love