Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/2] KABI example conversion and cleanup

[Kyle Moffett <mrmacman_g4@mac.com>]

On Mar 26, 2006, at 18:06:48, Eric Piel wrote:
> The real problem of sharing the same headers between kernel and  
> KABI is that it will end up by having to re-implement the "#ifdef  
> __KERNEL__"'s. Have a look at Kyle's second patch "Generalize  
> fd_set handling across architectures". Some headers had a different  
> version of the __FD_*() macros depending on the compiler. That's  
> something you may want to have in the implementation but definitely  
> not in the specification.
Actually, I think it's the other way around.  The <kabi/*.h> files  
should (eventually) be useable in basically any compilation  
environment thrown at it.  This means it should work from C and C++,  
using GCC, ICC, or some custom barely-standards-compliant compiler.   
I didn't bother with that part right now, since I still want to try  
to reuse the generic bitops if possible, but it's something I plan to  
address in future versions of the patchset (see below).
> In this situation, Kyle handled it nicely by writing versions  
> compatible with any compiler.
Eh, not really.  "__inline__" is GCC-specific and probably won't work  
in other compilers (unless you did "#define __inline__", which would  
bloat the code a lot).
This case highlights something else I'd like to do.  A good chunk of  
the functionality in the Linux kernel works both in userspace and  
kernelspace, and some of those arch-specific primitives (like the  
inline bitops) would be useful in defining the kabi headers.   
According to Jeff Dike, UML would like access to some of that stuff  
unrestricted by __KERNEL__ too.  In all of those cases, it's not an  
ABI and all the users are in-kernel so it could be changed at will.   
I'd like to try to put some of that into a "klib" directory (though  
with dependencies crossing between kabi and klib) so that it could be  
used in kabi and UML without duplicating functionality.  Naturally  
much of that would be C-only and depend on GCC, but I would have to  
be careful that the kabi portions used least-common-denominator  
functionality.
That brings up one final point: Does anybody actually use any  
compilers on Linux other than GCC?
Cheers,
Kyle Moffett

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