Re: Killing clones

Erik Troan (ewt@redhat.com)
Tue, 19 Aug 1997 15:49:51 -0400 (EDT)


On Fri, 15 Aug 1997, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:

> > Because of such and other reasons it might be a good idea to move to
> > a 32-bit pid in the future, so that pid's will be unique for a process.
>
> glibc already uses 32 bit PIDs. It's again up to the kernel to make
> the move.
>
> In general this brings up the question of whether we want to enforce a
> requirement that people upgrade to glibc when we move forward to the 2.2
> kernel.....

It might not be a terribly good idea to break all of the commercial software
built against libc 5. Linux's reputation for binary compatibility is already
shabby enough.

Could we use a separate personailty for this type of thing? Seems like it
would be easy enough to implement a proper 32bit syscall convention and
provide a kernel-level thunk down to 16bit values where necessary?

Erik

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