Re: [RFC] Splitting kernel headers and deprecating __KERNEL__

Alexandre Oliva
2004-11-30T21:42:18Z

On Nov 30, 2004, Alexandre Oliva <aoliva@redhat.com> wrote:

>> I've suggested "include/user/" and "include/asm-xxx/user", which handles
>> architecture-specific parts too. I'm ok with doing it the other way
>> around, ie "include/user/" and "include/user/arch-xxxx".

> As I pointed out, `user' is a very bad name. As you said yourself,
> we're talking about the *kernel* ABI. So what's `user' supposed to
> mean? Was I so successful in my arguments that you now see it as the
> userland ABI? :-)

I got carried away with joking and failed to repeat why I consider it
a bad name (assuming that, since you missed the beginning of the
thread, you probably missed the first reply I posted to the message
that started it): since we're going to install these headers in
/usr/include (where headers for userland live), /usr/include/user is
quite misleading. /usr/include/kernel would be far more
appropriate for this purpose.

Sure, we could take headers from linux-*/include/user and install them
in /usr/include/kernel, but then includes in there that reference
other headers in user/ or in asm-<arch>/ will cease to work.

So we should come up with a name that makes sense for both users of
these headers, which is why I suggested ukabi. linux/abi and
asm-<mach>/abi work just as well, and then we can soft-link `abi -> .'
in /usr/include/{linux,asm-<mach>} if needed. Ideally, we wouldn't
have to.

--
Alexandre Oliva http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}