HEADS-UP new statfs structure condidered harmful
Matthew Dillon
dillon at apollo.backplane.com
Sat Nov 15 13:59:03 PST 2003
:Expect to have to recompile the entire fricking world for a change
:this fundamental.
:
:Really, what should have appened is that the system call interface
:for stat should have been retired as "ostat", a new system call
:interface introduced, and the libc version number bumped, given a
:change this fundamental.
:
:Effectively, this will destroy binary backward compatability for
:everything in the world.
:
:-- Terry
:_______________________________________________
:freebsd-current at freebsd.org mailing list
I recommend that instead of rolling these sorts of system calls over
and over again (how many versions of stat do we have now? A lot!),
that instead you make a system call which returns a capability buffer
and then have libc load the capabilities it understands into the
structure. That way you don't have to worry about forwards and
backwards kernel compatibility.
This is what I plan to do with DragonFly for *stat(), *statfs*(),
various sysctls that return structures, and so forth. Wherever it makes
sense to do it.
-Matt
Matthew Dillon
<dillon at backplane.com>
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