Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:47:14 +0200 From: Max Laier <max@love2party.net> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Cc: Ken Smith <kensmith@cse.buffalo.edu>, David Southwell <david@vizion2000.net>, freebsd-current <freebsd-current@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Upcoming ABI Breakage in RELENG_7 Message-ID: <200807301147.15039.max@love2party.net> In-Reply-To: <200807300247.34948.david@vizion2000.net> References: <1217346345.12322.31.camel@bauer.cse.buffalo.edu> <200807300247.34948.david@vizion2000.net>
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On Wednesday 30 July 2008 11:47:34 David Southwell wrote: > On Tuesday 29 July 2008 08:45:45 Ken Smith wrote: ... > 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. An Application Binary Interface (ABI) breakage means a change of a complex datatype, or a function prototype - in C usually the change of a struct in size or field sort order. This change will effect all consumers of this Interface unless they are recompiled with the changed header files to also use the new interface. The impact depends greatly on the interface that is being changed. As Ken described in the initial mail this change is in the filesystem/vnode layer interface and thus will (only) concern consumers of that ABI. The changed interface is also a kernel-only interface - that means that only 3rd party kernel modules will be affected. I personally don't know of any 3rd party modules that muck about with filesystems (for which you can't get the source). That said, you might have to rebuild stuff like fuse after the breakage has happened. I assume that port maintainers of affected (kernel module) ports will bump the port revision after the change to give you/portupgrade a hint. -- /"\ Best regards, | mlaier@freebsd.org \ / Max Laier | ICQ #67774661 X http://pf4freebsd.love2party.net/ | mlaier@EFnet / \ ASCII Ribbon Campaign | Against HTML Mail and News
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