kernel HEAD && userland 7.0-REL?

[Mike Meyer]

On Fri, 4 Jul 2008 20:12:58 -0400
"Alexander Sack" <pisymbol at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 4:40 PM, Mike Meyer
> <mwm-keyword-freebsdhackers2.e313df at mired.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, 4 Jul 2008 14:42:27 +0200
> > Matthias Apitz <guru at unixarea.de> wrote:
> >> I'm running a RELENG_7 kernel and a userland as 7.0-REL on one of my
> >> laptops; I've been asked to check if a given driver problem in RELENG_7 is as
> >> well with HEAD... can I update the kernel to HEAD and let the userland
> >> (and all my compiled ports) as 7.0-REL; I know that this is not the
> >> intention, but it would cost me a lot of work if I should compile as
> >> well ~200 ports....
> >
> > When you say HEAD, do you mean the HEAD of 8-CURRENT or 7-STABLE?  In
> > either case whether or not it works depends on whether something has
> > changed in the kernel that has a required userland change.
> >
> > On the other hand, if you mean 7-STABLE, then the ports should work
> > properly whether userland does or not.
> 
> As a note, I just recently used HEAD on a 7_STABLE box to test changes
> recently to re for an updated PCIe revision NIC card on my Eee Box.
> It worked fine (both runtime and my NIC which I then patched my
> 7_STABLE tree which also worked, yea!).  In a thread I started about
> cross platform building, it seems that historically FreeBSD has had a
> very stable ABI allowing multiple kernels to run underneath different
> versions of user land (this is certainly not the case for all *NIX
> variants).

So stable that the things that break when you try and do this have
made it into the FAQ:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/troubleshoot.html#NLIST-FAILED

Personally, I managed to try this once when the console driver needed
a termcap entry change as well :-(.

    <mike

-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.

O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org