State of userland headers

[Rob Landley]

On Friday 24 March 2006 5:46 pm, Kyle Moffett wrote:

> however.  Since the kabi/*.h headers would not be kernel-version-
> specific, they could be copied to a system running an older kernel
> and reused there without problems.

Since when is the kernel ABI not kernel version specific?  You can use an 
older ABI on a newer kernel, but you can't use a newer ABI on an older 
kernel.

> Even though some of the syscalls 
> and ioctls referenced in the kabi headers might not be present on the
> running kernel, portable programs are expected to be able to sanely
> handle older kernels.

At the source level, maybe.  At the binary level?  Not really.

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.