Re: [openib-general] Re: [RFC] Move InfiniBand .h files

Arjan van de Ven
2005-08-04T19:51:59Z

On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 11:26 -0700, Grant Grundler wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 04, 2005 at 07:53:58PM +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 10:32 -0700, Roland Dreier wrote:
> > > I would like to get people's reactions to moving the InfiniBand .h
> > > files from their current location in drivers/infiniband/include/ to
> > > include/linux/rdma/. If we agree that this is a good idea then I'll
> > > push this change as soon as 2.6.14 starts.
> >
> > please only put userspace clean headers here; the rest is more or less
> > private headers for your subsystem.
>
> Sorry...this smells like a rathole...but does this mean
> linus agrees the kernel subsystems should export headers suitable for
> both user space and kernel driver modules?
>
> Historical, I thought glibc and other user space libs were expected to
> maintain their own set of header files. Maybe I'm just confused...

there is a definite requirement for the kernel to expose SOME things to
userspace. Well for SOMETHING to expose them. Right now most distros
ship a hacked up version of the kernel headers (eg removed of all the
kernel specific stuff and all the gpl inline code etc). A good part of
making such an external project possible is to make a clean separation
between userspace shared stuff and pure kernel internals.