Upcoming ABI Breakage in RELENG_7

[Ronald Klop]

On Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:47:34 +0200, David Southwell <david at vizion2000.net>  
wrote:

> On Tuesday 29 July 2008 08:45:45 Ken Smith 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.
>>
>> Thanks.
> Sometimes information gets posted to this list on the assumption that  
> everyone
> understand what the writer means.
>
> This is one of those occasions!!
>
> For those of us who are not as well informed and experienced  as others  
> could
> someone please explain what is meant by an  ABI breakage, its  
> implications
> and how to deal with them.
>
> Thanks
>
> David

Googling for ABI gives me this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_binary_interface

That is part of what you want to know.

Ronald.