Upcoming ABI Breakage in RELENG_7

[Alfred Perlstein]

* Ken Smith <kensmith at cse.Buffalo.EDU> [080729 08:47] wrote:
> 
> Normally the FreeBSD Project tries very hard to avoid ABI breakage in
> "Stable Branches".  However occasionally the fix for a bug can not be
> implemented without ABI breakage, and it is decided that the fix
> warrants the impact of the ABI breakage.  We have one of those
> situations coming along for RELENG_7 (what will become FreeBSD 7.1).
> The ABI breakage should only impact kernel modules that are not part of
> the baseline system (those will be patched by the MFC) which deal with
> advisory locks.  As such the impact should not cause many people
> problems.
> 
> The work that will be MFCed fixes issues with filesystem advisory locks,
> and moves the advisory locks list from filesystem-private data
> structures into the vnode structure.
> 
> The MFC will be done by Kostantin Belousov some time this coming Friday
> (August 1st, 2008) if you have concerns and want to watch for it.

Ken,

Can you point at a cvs/svn log or two that details the change and
why?

Everyone else:
For those confused about what ABI breakage means:

 It means that you'll need to recompile your kernel modules and
 potentially your system utilities that access kernel data structures
 to display statistics.

It seems like in this particular case you won't need to recompile, but
it's a good idea just to be safe to recompile kernel, world and any
third party kernel modules you have.

thank you,
-Alfred