Kernel prepatch 4.1-rc1

Posted Apr 28, 2015 18:33 UTC (Tue) by juhl (guest, #33245)
In reply to: Kernel prepatch 4.1-rc1 by nye
Parent article: Kernel prepatch 4.1-rc1

Except you'd still have syscalls, ioctls or other gunk lying around. Once the kernel exposes an interface that userspace can invoke that interface has to stay in place and be functional - even if 99% of everyone move to the userspace interface.

Kernel prepatch 4.1-rc1

Posted Apr 29, 2015 12:00 UTC (Wed) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

Oh I see. I was thinking in terms of of consumers of an API that don't care about the implementation details beyond "it does what I need, as quickly as I need", in the same way that when I link against glibc I don't care whether or not it has to do some song and dance to get some function to work on some particular kernel (does that happen? I've never had to care).
But that was rather short-sighted - some software will of course end up calling the kernel's own interfaces directly you would at least need an ABI shim to stay around forever.