Re: State of userland headers

Kyle Moffett
2006-03-25T06:27:38Z

On Mar 24, 2006, at 22:19:54, Rob Landley wrote:
> 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.

By the very definition of "ABI", it _must_ not be kernel version
specific. A program written for a newer ABI and compiled against it
_must_ be able to gracefully handle syscalls not existing when run on
an older kernel. The program may fail to work entirely because the
syscalls it needs are not present, but that's no different than a
"Kernel does not have feature CONFIG_FOO enabled" issue.

>> 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.

The ABI must be compatible at both source and binary interfaces,
"Application _Binary_ Interface" is the name, after all. It's OK to
introduce new features so long as you can gracefully handle them not
being present. Look for example at what happens if I take V4L apps
and run them on a 2.4.0 kernel without V4L. They report that the
kernel is too old or missing features, but aside from V4L not being
present, everything just works.

As a result, I think that if we can clean up the headers in kernel,
we can reuse those same headers for compiling userspace everywhere,
even if the userspace is going to be run on an older kernel.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett