Re: State of userland headers

Rob Landley
2006-03-25T03:20:32Z

On Friday 24 March 2006 5:46 pm, Kyle Moffett wrote:

> however. Since the kabi/*.h headers would not be kernel-version-
> specific, they could be copied to a system running an older kernel
> and reused there without problems.

Since when is the kernel ABI not kernel version specific? You can use an
older ABI on a newer kernel, but you can't use a newer ABI on an older
kernel.

> Even though some of the syscalls
> and ioctls referenced in the kabi headers might not be present on the
> running kernel, portable programs are expected to be able to sanely
> handle older kernels.

At the source level, maybe. At the binary level? Not really.

Rob
--
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.