Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 22:13:30 -0700 From: Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org> To: Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org>, Release Engineering <releng@ironport.com>, FreeBSD Current <current@freebsd.org> Subject: last gasp additions to 7.0 for future-proofing. Message-ID: <472025FA.4070307@elischer.org>
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Is the there a chance we can make a quick pass through various structures and add some pad words to them? There will probably be several additions that people may want to bring in later in 7.x that may be made a lot easier if there were a few spare fields here and there. I heard robert say he could do with a few pads in before the release, so if it's possible we should quickly throw in some structures to consider so that we can keep a frozen ABI for teh 7.x branch. For example the kinfo structs used by ps and top etc and libkvm could probably do with a few spare words (though there may be enough deprecated fields in that one to supply some space.) Also as there is always so much stuff going on in networking, it's possible that an extra field in some of the structures involved there may be useful over the life of 7.0. Historically a couple of pads in struct iface would have been nice in past years. Certainly structures that 3rd party drivers would need to include/use could do with an extra field or two. As another example, if we had some pads in about half a dozen structures, it would be possible to back port the vimage stuff to 7.3 or so if it turns out to be really successful in 8.x. (aiming for compatibility in the "compiled out" mode). I've heard others mention occasionally that it might be nice to put some pads here and there.. now is probably the last possible moment to speak up..
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