Re: Syscall backporting and linux-libc-headers

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Thu, 2012-03-22 at 13:22 +0100, Koen Kooi wrote:
> In my never ending quest to get consolekit/polkit/etc working properly
> I've found that CONFIG_AUDITSYSCALL is really usefull (it's usefull in
> other contexts as well, but that's outside the oe-core set of
> recipes). It has the following problem:
> 
> config AUDITSYSCALL
>         bool "Enable system-call auditing support"
>         depends on AUDIT && (X86 || PPC || S390 || IA64 || UML ||
> SPARC64 || SUPERH)
> 
> No MIPS or ARM support. There recently was a pull request from Al Viro
> to get at least ARM support into mainline, but I'm not sure what
> happened to that. Anyway, I backported the ARM patch to 3.0 and 3.2,
> but to make it usefull I'd need to patch linux-libc-headers and bump
> PR on virtual/libc.
> 
> What's the OE-core position on backporting syscalls to
> linux-libc-headers? 

Why can't we just increase the linux-libc-headers version? Presumably
someone running a kernel without the patches won't see any issue, the
syscall just won't be present and software will fall back?

I think the big concern would be deviating from mainline as its not so
much a backport as a divergence at this point (and this is why we can't
just upgrade)?

CC'ing Bruce since I know he holds opinions on this kind of thing :)

Cheers,

Richard