From owner-freebsd-arch Tue Nov 26 16:18:17 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E924437B401; Tue, 26 Nov 2002 16:18:15 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.rpi.edu (mail.rpi.edu [128.113.22.40]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 270C943E4A; Tue, 26 Nov 2002 16:18:15 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from drosih@rpi.edu) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.netel.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by mail.rpi.edu (8.12.1/8.12.1) with ESMTP id gAR0I6ZK044940; Tue, 26 Nov 2002 19:18:06 -0500 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: drosih@mail.rpi.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <2079.1038351585@critter.freebsd.dk> References: <2079.1038351585@critter.freebsd.dk> Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 19:18:04 -0500 To: Poul-Henning Kamp , Robert Watson From: Garance A Drosihn Subject: Re: ABIs and 5.x branch: freeze kernel module ABI at 5.0 or 5.1? Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.3 (www dot roaringpenguin dot com slash mimedefang) Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 11:59 PM +0100 11/26/02, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: > Robert Watson writes: > > > As such, I think a reasonable strategy would be to avoid exactly > > that: rather than making guarantees about the ABI for 5.0, simply > > assert that the ABI for kernel drivers will not be frozen until > > 5.1, so vendors should be aware that they may have to rebuild > > their driver. > >It's very simple in my mind: we only freeze ABI's on -stable branches >(and we actually even violated that for 4-stable I belive). > >Whenever we branch a new -stable from -current, that's when we >freeze the ABI's for that branch. My initial reaction to this description is that it "sounds reasonable". However, I guess I'm not sure what the head branch will be called after 5.0-release, and before we consider it "production quality". Presumably it will still be called -current, but it can't be the same kind of -current as it was before 5.0-release. *Some* things have to be considered frozen, or else 5.0-release is a meaningless datapoint. So, I have no problem with saying that kernel ABI's will not be frozen until 5.1-release, but I assume all the user-level ABI's and API's are considered frozen at 5.0-release. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message