Upcoming ABI Breakage in RELENG_7

[Doug Barton]

David Southwell wrote:
> It sure helps the understanding bit but how about specific instructions about 
> who is to what to do in this instance?

I fear that the forest is getting lost for the trees here. :)

Under most (90% or more) circumstances "stuff," be that kernel modules 
or userland binaries, that is on a -stable system will still work in 
its current form after you do an upgrade. In the event of an actual 
ABI breakage you would be informed of when and where to tune for 
additional .... wait, wrong PSA. If this had actually been an ABI 
breakage then any userland binaries that depend on the thing that 
changed would have to be recompiled after the update in order to 
continue working. Since this is actually a KERNEL interface that's 
changing, any kernel modules that use this interface (which is quite a 
lot) will have to be recompiled _as part of the update_ for them to work.

If you are not using any 3rd party kernel modules (commercial, ports 
tree, etc.) then you have nothing to worry about. Your FreeBSD kernel 
modules will be updated along with the kernel, and everyone is happy. 
If you are using a 3rd party module from ports that deals with file 
systems (and yes, FUSE is an obvious example here) then you'll need to 
pkg_delete it, do the update, then recompile. Q.E.D.

If you happen to be using a commercial (i.e., you don't have the 
source) kernel module that deals with file systems now is the time to 
contact your vendor and let them know about this issue. However, as 
Ken rightly pointed out this change will actually impact a very small 
percentage of FreeBSD users, and the majority of that impact will be 
recompiling a port as described above.

I should also point out that FreeBSD developers deal with this issue 
all the time on -current since things there are allowed to change, and 
sometimes do change quite often. Therefore it's easy for us to forget 
to list important details about a change like this since it's second 
nature to us.


hth,

Doug

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