RHEL 5.4 released

Posted Sep 3, 2009 17:01 UTC (Thu) by blitzkrieg3 (guest, #57873)
In reply to: RHEL 5.4 released by qg6te2
Parent article: RHEL 5.4 released

While the other comments are not necessarily wrong, they do leave out kernel ABI. When Red Hat says it's using -18, they mean that the kernel ABI has _not_ changed since vanilla -18. This is required for proprietary drivers and even some software when syscalls are added and removed

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RHEL 5.4 released

Posted Sep 4, 2009 10:53 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Syscalls are removed? When?

(Apps are broken by syscalls being added? How?)

RHEL 5.4 released

Posted Sep 4, 2009 14:26 UTC (Fri) by blitzkrieg3 (guest, #57873) [Link]

Okay, maybe I should have said _changed_, but I think there are syscalls that get removed from time to time, I just can't think of them.

http://lwn.net/Articles/350219/

There is also the question of which semantics older applications should get. Jamie Lokier argued that applications requesting O_SYNC behavior wanted full metadata synchronization, even if the kernel has been cheating them out of the full experience. So, when running under a future kernel with a proper O_SYNC implementation, an old, binary application should get O_SYNC behavior.