kernel HEAD && userland 7.0-REL?

Alexander Sack pisymbol at gmail.com
Sat Jul 5 02:38:07 UTC 2008


On Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 8:27 PM, Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:
> 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 :-(.

Oh c'mon now....if this is the worst of your problems, then you're
doing pretty darn good.  I believe Linux binaries rely on the version
of glibc, an aux vec entry, and the way the kernel was actually built
to figure out whether to use syscall or int to hop into the kernel.  I
mean things could be a lot worse!! :D!

-aps


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