Re: [RFC] Splitting kernel headers and deprecating __KERNEL__

Arjan van de Ven
2004-11-29T07:53:45Z

On Sun, Nov 28, 2004 at 11:36:22PM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> >In particular, any re-organization that breaks _existing_ uses is totally
> >pointless. If you break existing uses, you might as well _not_ re-
> >organize, since if you consider kernel headers to be purely kernel-
> >internal (like they should be, but hey, reality trumps any wishes we might
> >have), then the current organization is perfectly fine.
>
>
> I don't think any drastic reorganization is even necessary.

Well, we want things to be split. However a split doesn't mean a
reorganisation as far as userspace visibility is concerned; the filenames
can still be the same, and the typenames etc etc, you just do the kernel
internal additions in a different dir/header

Not breaking userland ever is a dream only, anytime we touch any header,
some userland breaks (they use our spinlock code even!)

> kernel-specific stuff stripped out. i.e. userland ABI only. Not sure
> how many distros have started picking that up yet... I think Arjan said
> Fedora Core had, or would.

nope.

Fedora has it's own set of cleaned up headers. Cleaned up in the sense that
tehre's no #ifdef KERNEL anymore, no inlines (because that's a license trap,
and in addition, all inlines were kernel specific anyway) and all structs
which had spinlocks / semaphores and other kernel private structures in are
removed as well (because they are clearly kernel internal).