Upcoming ABI Breakage in RELENG_7

[Kostik Belousov]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 02:47:34AM -0700, David Southwell 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.

The small glitch in the announcement is use of the ABI == Application
Binary Interface term, that is better be replaced by KBI == Kernel Binary
Interface. No usermode breakage is expected to result from MFC. The
only consequence is the need to adopt some out-of-tree filesystems, not
that I am aware of any ATM.

If you are the author or maintainer of such module, then you need to watch
this out.
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