Re: Userland headers available

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Fri Jan 23 2004 - 20:47:32 EST


Followup to: <4011788D.3070606@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
By author: Chris Friesen <cfriesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> Friesen, Christopher [CAR:7Q28:EXCH] wrote:
>
> > The obvious way is to have the kernel headers include the userland
> > headers, then everything below that be wrapped in "#ifdef __KERNEL__".
> > Userland then includes the normal kernel headers, but only gets the
> > userland-safe ones.
>
> I just realized this wasn't clear. I envision a new set of headers in
> the kernel that are clean to export to userland. The current headers
> then include the appropriate userland-clean ones, and everything below
> that is kernel only.
>
> This lets the kernel maintain the userland-clean headers explicitly, and
> we don't have the work of cleaning them up for glibc.
>

We've referred to this for quite a while as the "ABI header project";
it's been targetted for 2.7, since it missed the 2.6 freeze.

We have set up a mailing list at:

http://zytor.com/mailman/listinfo/linuxabi

The goal is to get a formal exportable version of the kernel ABI that
user-space libraries can use.

-hpa
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