From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S965185AbVINNkA (ORCPT ); Wed, 14 Sep 2005 09:40:00 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S965207AbVINNkA (ORCPT ); Wed, 14 Sep 2005 09:40:00 -0400 Received: from prgy-npn1.prodigy.com ([207.115.54.37]:34063 "EHLO oddball.prodigy.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S965185AbVINNkA (ORCPT ); Wed, 14 Sep 2005 09:40:00 -0400 Message-ID: <4328299C.9020904@tmr.com> Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 09:46:04 -0400 From: Bill Davidsen User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.11) Gecko/20050729 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "H. Peter Anvin" , Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: [RFC] Splitting out kernel<=>userspace ABI headers References: <20050902134108.GA16374@codepoet.org> <22D79100-00B5-44F6-992C-FFFEACA49E66@mac.com> <20050902235833.GA28238@codepoet.org> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org H. Peter Anvin wrote: > Followup to: <20050902235833.GA28238@codepoet.org> > By author: Erik Andersen > In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel > >> >>That would be wonderful. >> >> >>It would be especially nice if everything targeting user space >>were to use only all the nice standard ISO C99 types as defined >>in include/stdint.h such as uint32_t and friends... >> > > > Absolutely not. This would be a POSIX namespace violation; they > *must* use double-underscore types. Could you explain why you think it would be a violation to use POSIX types instead of defining our own? That's what the types are for, to avoid having everyone define some slightly conflicting types. The kernel predates C99, sort of, and it would be a massive but valuable task to figure out where a type is really, for instance, 32 bits rather than "size of default int" in length, etc, and use POSIX types where they are correct. Fewer things to maintain, and would make it clear when something is 32 bits by default and when it really must be 32 bits. -- -bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com) "The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the last possible moment - but no longer" -me