From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1750861AbVIBUwE (ORCPT ); Fri, 2 Sep 2005 16:52:04 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1750891AbVIBUwE (ORCPT ); Fri, 2 Sep 2005 16:52:04 -0400 Received: from smtpout.mac.com ([17.250.248.45]:46329 "EHLO smtpout.mac.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750861AbVIBUwD (ORCPT ); Fri, 2 Sep 2005 16:52:03 -0400 In-Reply-To: <20050902134108.GA16374@codepoet.org> References: <20050902134108.GA16374@codepoet.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v734) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed Message-Id: <22D79100-00B5-44F6-992C-FFFEACA49E66@mac.com> Cc: LKML Kernel , Linus Torvalds , Andrew Morton Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Kyle Moffett Subject: Re: [RFC] Splitting out kernel<=>userspace ABI headers Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 16:51:49 -0400 To: andersen@codepoet.org X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.734) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Sep 2, 2005, at 09:41:09, Erik Andersen wrote: > On Thu Sep 01, 2005 at 11:00:16PM -0400, Kyle Moffett wrote: >> A while ago there was a big discussion about splitting out the >> userspace-accessible portions of the kernel headers into a separate >> directory, "kabi", "kernel-abi", "linux-abi", or a half-dozen other >> suggestions. Linus sprinkled a bit of holy-penguin-pee on the idea, >> but nothing ever really happened after that. > > Have you seen the linux-libc-headers: > http://ep09.pld-linux.org/~mmazur/linux-libc-headers/ > which, while not an official part of the kernel, do a pretty > good job... Well, the eventual goal of this project would be to eliminate the need for linux-libc-headers by making that task trivial (IE: Just copy the kcore/ and kabi/ (or whatever they get called) directories into /usr/include. There would probably be some compatibility headers installed into /usr/include/linux until 2.8 is released or 2.7 is forked for some major internal modification, but other than that, the stuff shared by userspace and kernelspace would be only in kcore and kabi, and eventually the linux/* stuff could remove all the __KERNEL__ ifdefs contained therein. Right now linux-libc-headers is maintained by one person at each kernel revision. It would be much better if that maintenance load could be undertaken instead by those who create the code that uses those headers, the kernel developers themselves, because they surely understand it better and are likely to be able to do it more easily and accurately. Cheers, Kyle Moffett -- Unix was not designed to stop people from doing stupid things, because that would also stop them from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn